Re: [PATCH 0/2] xfs: fix some new memory allocation failures

Mark Tinguely
2013-09-03T13:07:23Z

On 09/02/13 17:20, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 02, 2013 at 12:03:37PM -0500, Mark Tinguely wrote:
>> On 09/02/13 05:52, Dave Chinner wrote:
>>> Hi folks,
>>>
>>> These failures are a result of order-4 allocations being done on v5
>>> filesystems to support the large ACL count xattrs. The first patch
>>> puts out usual falbback to vmalloc workaround in place. The second
>>> patch factors all the places we now have this fallback-to-vmalloc
>>> and makes it transparent to the callers.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Dave.
>>
>> Thanks for clean up. Broken record time: Do we really need order
>> allocation in the filesystem? Esp in xfs_ioctl.c.
>
> I don't understand your question. Are you asking why we need high
> order allocation?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave.

In patch 2, why not drop the physically contiguous allocation attempt
and just do the virtually contiguous allocation?

Things that now call kmem_zalloc_large() do not need a physically
contiguous memory, it will simplify the allocation, it will leave the
physically contiguous pieces for other Linux code that really need it.

--Mark.