Re: Feedback on preemptible kernel patch

Jeremy Zawodny
2001-09-10T03:36:46Z

On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 05:24:36AM +0200, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On September 9, 2001 11:37 pm, Robert Love wrote:
> > On Sun, 2001-09-09 at 17:23, Arjan Filius wrote:
> > > After my succes report i _do_ noticed something unusual:
> > >
> > > I'm not sure it's preempt related, but you wanted feedback :)
> > >
> > > Sep 9 23:08:02 sjoerd kernel: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x70/1).
> > > Sep 9 23:08:02 sjoerd last message repeated 93 times
> > > Sep 9 23:08:02 sjoerd kernel: cation failed (gfp=0x70/1).
> > > Sep 9 23:08:02 sjoerd kernel: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x70/1).
>
>
> This may not be your fault. It's a GFP_NOFS recursive allocation -
> this comes either from grow_buffers or ReiserFS, probably the
> former. In either case, it means we ran completely out of free
> pages, even though the caller is willing to wait. Hmm. It smells
> like a loophole in vm scanning.

I've seen that error on a couple 2.4.9 systems at work. It's
certainly VM related, 'cause it doesn't happen when I disable swap on
them. I've disabled it for performance reasons (the VM system is a
little retarded in 2.4.x IMHO, so I'm just not letting it swap).

Jeremy
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