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

Peter Zijlstra
2010-08-25T11:35:44Z

On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 07:24 -0400, Ted Ts'o wrote:
> Part of the problem is that we have a few places in the kernel where
> failure is really not an option --- or rather, if we're going to fail
> while we're in the middle of doing a commit, our choices really are
> (a) retry the loop in the jbd layer (which Andrew really doesn't
> like), (b) keep our own private cache of free memory so we don't fail
> and/or loop, (c) fail the file system and mark it read-only, or (d)
> panic.

d) do the allocation before you're committed to going fwd and can still
fail and back out.