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From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: andrea@suse.de, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] 2.6.5-aa1 arch updates
Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2004 14:51:26 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20040404145126.03156a15.akpm@osdl.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0404041446430.22502-100000@localhost.localdomain>

Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> wrote:
>
> I notice that's a __GFP_REPEAT allocation, but even those fail when
>  OOM-killed - I find its alias __GFP_NOFAIL very misleading.

#define __GFP_REPEAT	0x400	/* Retry the allocation.  Might fail */
#define __GFP_NOFAIL	0x800	/* Retry for ever.  Cannot fail */

__GFP_REPEAT is mainly for higher-order allocations which would otherwise
have given up too early.

__GFP_NOFAIL means "the caller is lame and cannot handle a failure".

Yes, they're the same thing at present.  But if someone chooses to change
the page allocator so that it returns 0 on exhaustion rather than
oom-killing, these two things become different - the altered page allocator
should continue to loop-until-success on __GFP_NOFAIL allocations.

I guess this means that __GFP_NOFAIL allocators shouldn't be oom-killed.

  parent reply	other threads:[~2004-04-04 21:51 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2004-04-04 13:48 [PATCH] 2.6.5-aa1 arch updates Hugh Dickins
2004-04-04 15:49 ` Andrea Arcangeli
2004-04-04 22:30   ` Paul Mackerras
2004-04-04 23:09     ` Andrea Arcangeli
2004-04-04 21:51 ` Andrew Morton [this message]
2004-04-04 22:10   ` Andrew Morton

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