Re: [PATCH 0/5] make slab gfp fair

Peter Zijlstra
2007-05-17T17:53:31Z

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 10:29 -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Thu, 17 May 2007, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
> > I'm really not seeing why you're making such a fuzz about it; normally
> > when you push the system this hard we're failing allocations left right
> > and center too. Its just that the block IO path has some mempools which
> > allow it to write out some (swap) pages and slowly get back to sanity.
>
> I am weirdly confused by these patches. Among other things you told me
> that the performance does not matter since its never (or rarely) being
> used (why do it then?).

When we are very low on memory and do access the reserves by means of
ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS, we want to avoid processed that are not entitled to
use such memory from running away with the little we have.

That is the whole and only point; restrict memory allocated under
ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS to those processes that are entitled to it.