Re: About the free page pool

Rik van Riel
2002-09-03T01:35:13Z

On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:

> The most important are 1-order allocations (8k, for kernel stacks).
> The memory allocator will retry these allocations indefinitely, so
> they end up succeeding, somehow.
>
> I think there's a bug in there, actually. If all zones have enough
> free memory but there are no 1-order pages available, then the 1-order
> allocator tried to run page reclaim, which will say "nope, nothing
> needs doing". Eventually, someone else returns some memory and coalescing
> happens. It's not a very glorious part of the kernel design.

This is fixable with rmap, though. Another old item on my TODO list. ;(

regards,

Rik
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