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

David Rientjes
2010-08-26T03:12:04Z

On Wed, 25 Aug 2010, Christoph Lameter wrote:

> > 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?
>

Because we can remove the flag, remove branches from the page allocator
slowpath, and none of these allocations actually are dependent on
__GFP_NOFAIL since they are all under PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER.