From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:14:26 -0800 (PST) From: Christoph Lameter Subject: Re: [PATCH] Fix boot problem in situations where the boot CPU is running on a memoryless node In-Reply-To: <84144f020801231302g2cafdda9kf7f916121dc56aa5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: References: <20080123075821.GA17713@aepfle.de> <20080123121459.GA18631@aepfle.de> <20080123125236.GA18876@aepfle.de> <20080123135513.GA14175@csn.ul.ie> <20080123155655.GB20156@csn.ul.ie> <20080123195220.GB3848@us.ibm.com> <84144f020801231302g2cafdda9kf7f916121dc56aa5@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Pekka Enberg Cc: Nishanth Aravamudan , Mel Gorman , akpm@linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org, "Aneesh Kumar K.V" , KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki , lee.schermerhorn@hp.com, Linux MM , Olaf Hering List-ID: On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Pekka Enberg wrote: > I think Mel said that their configuration did work with 2.6.23 > although I also wonder how that's possible. AFAIK there has been some > changes in the page allocator that might explain this. That is, if > kmem_getpages() returned pages for memoryless node before, bootstrap > would have worked. Regular kmem_getpages is called with GFP_THISNODE set. There was some breakage in 2.6.22 and before with GFP_THISNODE returning pages from the wrong node if a node had no memory. So it may have worked accidentally and in an unsafe manner because the pages would have been associated with the wrong node which could trigger bug ons and locking troubles. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org