Re: [RFC 0/3] Recursive reclaim (on __PF_MEMALLOC)

Christoph Lameter
2007-09-05T12:14:18Z

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:

> However I really have an aversion to the near enough is good enough way of
> thinking. Especially when it comes to fundamental deadlocks in the VM. I
> don't know whether Peter's patch is completely clean yet, but fixing the
> fundamentally broken code has my full support.

Uhh. There are already numerous other issues why the VM is failing that is
independent of Peter's approach.

> I hate it that there are theoretical bugs still left even if they would
> be hit less frequently than hardware failure. And that people are really
> happy to put even more of these things in :(

Theoretical bugs? Depends on one's creativity to come up with them I
guess. So far we do not even get around to address the known issues and
this multi subsystem patch has the potential of creating more.

> Anyway, as you know I like your patch and if that gives Peter a little
> more breathing space then it's a good thing. But I really hope he doesn't
> give up on it, and it should be merged one day.

Using the VM to throttle networking is a pretty bad thing because it
assumes single critical user of memory. There are other consumers of
memory and if you have a load that depends on other things than networking
then you should not kill the other things that want memory.