Re: [PATCH][1/2] adjust dirty threshold for lowmem-only mappings

Nikita Danilov
2004-12-25T22:03:37Z

William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> writes:

> On Sat, 25 Dec 2004, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>>> the first place? If that happens it means you're under a lowmem
>>> shortage, something you apparently ruled out when you said
>>> lowmem_reserve couldn't help your workload.
>
> On Sat, Dec 25, 2004 at 12:59:10PM -0500, Rik van Riel wrote:
>> Let me explain a 3rd time:
> [...]
>> If you have any more questions as to why the bug happens, don't
>> hesitate to ask and I'll explain you why this problem happens.
>
> This is an old and well-known problem.
>
> Lifting the artificial lowmem restrictions on blockdev mappings
> (thereby nuking mapping->gfp_mask altogether) would resolve a number of
> problems, not that anything making that much sense could ever happen.

mapping->gfp_mask is used for other things beyond specifying a
zonelist. For example, file systems want all allocations inside a
transaction to be done with GFP_NOFS, which forces GFP_NOFS in
mapping->gfp_mask of meta-data address_spaces.

>
>
> -- wli

Nikita.