Re: [PATCH] mm-slab: allocate kmem_cache with __GFP_REPEAT

Christoph Lameter
2011-07-20T13:54:15Z

On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, Pekka Enberg wrote:

> On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, Konstantin Khlebnikov wrote:
> > > The changelog isn't that convincing, really. This is kmem_cache_create()
> > > so I'm surprised we'd ever get NULL here in practice. Does this fix some
> > > problem you're seeing? If this is really an issue, I'd blame the page
> > > allocator as GFP_KERNEL should just work.
> >
> > nf_conntrack creates separate slab-cache for each net-namespace,
> > this patch of course not eliminates the chance of failure, but makes it more
> > acceptable.
>
> I'm still surprised you are seeing failures. mm/slab.c hasn't changed
> significantly in a long time. Why hasn't anyone reported this before? I'd
> still be inclined to shift the blame to the page allocator... Mel, Christoph?

There was a lot of recent fiddling with the reclaim logic. Maybe some of
those changes caused the problem?