Re: Linux-2.4.5

Ben LaHaise
2001-05-26T02:50:19Z

On Sat, 26 May 2001, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> Allocating a buffer head during out of memory is always been deadlock
> prone, 2.2 always had the same problem too. I'm not sure why you are
> telling me this, I didn't changed anything that happens to be in the
> swapout path (besides removing the deadlock in create_bounces with
> evolution of first Ingo's patch but that is not specific to the
> swapout). I only changed the getblk path (which is not used by the
> swapout, at least unless you swapout on a file not on a blkdev, but even
> in that case the change is fine).

Highmem. 0 free pages in ZONE_NORMAL. Now try to allocate a buffer_head.
Running under heavy load runs into this even after there is a highmem
bounce buffer pool.

> btw in the below patch __GFP_FAIL is a noop.

<shrug> merge that patch from -ac then.

-ben