Re: [patch 1/5] mm: add nofail variants of kmalloc kcalloc and kzalloc

Christoph Lameter
2010-08-26T01:30:24Z

On Wed, 25 Aug 2010, David Rientjes wrote:

> On Wed, 25 Aug 2010, Christoph Lameter wrote:
>
> > If the higher order fails in slub then an order 0 alloc is attempted
> > without __GFP_NORETRY. In both cases the nofail behavior of the page
> > allocator determines the outcode.
> >
>
> Right, I thought you said the slab layer passes __GFP_NOFAIL when there's
> no objects available.

Yes, the slab layer calls the page allocator when there are no objects
available and passes the __GFP_NOFAIL that the user may have set in the
call to the page allocator.

Why then add new functions that do the same?