Re: [PATCH] JBD slab cleanups

Andrew Morton
2007-09-19T02:20:01Z

On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:00:01 -0700 Mingming Cao <cmm@us.ibm.com> wrote:

> JBD: Replace slab allocations with page cache allocations
>
> JBD allocate memory for committed_data and frozen_data from slab. However
> JBD should not pass slab pages down to the block layer. Use page allocator pages instead. This will also prepare JBD for the large blocksize patchset.
>
>
> Also this patch cleans up jbd_kmalloc and replace it with kmalloc directly

__GFP_NOFAIL should only be used when we have no way of recovering
from failure. The allocation in journal_init_common() (at least)
_can_ recover and hence really shouldn't be using __GFP_NOFAIL.

(Actually, nothing in the kernel should be using __GFP_NOFAIL. It is
there as a marker which says "we really shouldn't be doing this but
we don't know how to fix it").

So sometime it'd be good if you could review all the __GFP_NOFAILs in
there and see if we can remove some, thanks.