Re: the new VMt

Ingo Molnar
2000-09-25T17:03:46Z

On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Yes, I'm inclined to agree. Or at least not disagree. I'm more arguing
> that the order itself may not be the most interesting thing, and that
> I don't think the balancing has to take the order of the allocation
> into account - because it should be equivalent to just tell that it's
> a soft allocation (whether though the current !__GFP_HIGH or through a
> new __GFP_SOFT with slightly different logic).

yep, and there is another problem with pure order-based distinction: if i
do kmalloc(5k), and write the code on Alpha and expect it to never fail,
shouldnt i expect this to never fail on x86 as well? Along with the fork()
failure. __GFP_SOFT solves this all very nicely - the *allocator* decides
what allocation policy to follow. Great!

Ingo