Re: the new VMt

Linus Torvalds
2000-09-25T16:35:53Z

On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>
> But I'd much prefer to pass not only the classzone from allocator
> to memory balancing, but _also_ the order of the allocation,
> and then shrink_mmap will know it doesn't worth to free anything
> that isn't contigous on the order of the allocation that we need.

I suspect that the proper way to do this is to just make another gfp_flag,
which is basically another hint to the mm layer that we're doing a multi-
page allocation and that the MM layer should not try forever to handle it.

In fact, that's independent of whether it is a multi-page allocation or
not. It might be something like __GFP_SOFT - you could use it with single
pages too.

Thinking about it, we do have it already. It's called !__GFP_HIGH, and it
used by all the GFP_USER allocations.

Linus