Re: [ANOMALIES]: 2.4.2 - __alloc_pages: failed - Patch failed

Marcelo Tosatti
2001-02-26T14:34:21Z

On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Alan Cox wrote:

> > We can add an allocation flag (__GFP_NO_CRITICAL?) which can be used by
> > sg_low_malloc() (and other non critical allocations) to fail previously
> > and not print the message.
>
> It is just for debugging. The message can go. If anytbing it would be more
> useful to tack Failed alloc data on the end of /proc/slabinfo

The issue is not the warn message.

Non critical allocations (such as this case of sg_low_malloc()) are trying
to get additional memory to optimize things -- we want the allocator to be
lazy and fail previously instead doing hard work. If kswapd cannot keep up
with the memory pressure, we're surely in a memory shortage state.

Its better to get out of the memory shortage instead running into OOM
because of some optimization, I guess.

Another example of such a flag is swapin readahead.