[PATCH 0/3] Reduce GFP_ATOMIC allocation failures, partial fix V3

Mel Gorman
2009-10-27T13:40:38Z

Since 2.6.31-rc1, there have been an increasing number of GFP_ATOMIC
failures. A significant number of these have been high-order GFP_ATOMIC
failures and while they are generally brushed away, there has been a large
increase in them recently and there are a number of possible areas the
problem could be in - core vm, page writeback and a specific driver. The
bugs affected by this that I am aware of are;

[Bug #14141] order 2 page allocation failures in iwlagn
[Bug #14141] order 2 page allocation failures (generic)
[Bug #14265] ifconfig: page allocation failure. order:5, mode:0x8020 w/ e100
[No BZ ID] Kernel crash on 2.6.31.x (kcryptd: page allocation failure..)
[No BZ ID] page allocation failure message kernel 2.6.31.4 (tty-related)

The three patches in this series partially address the problem. I am
proposing these for merging to mainline and -stable now to reduce the number
of duplicate bug reports. The following bug should be fixed by these patches.

[No BZ ID] page allocation failure message kernel 2.6.31.4 (tty-related)

The following bug becomes very difficult to reproduce with these patches;

[Bug #14265] ifconfig: page allocation failure. order:5, mode:0x8020 w/ e100

The rest of the bugs remain open.

If these patches are agreed upon, they should be also considered -stable
candidates. Patch 1 does not apply cleanly but I can supply a version
that does.

mm/page_alloc.c | 4 ++--
mm/vmscan.c | 9 +++++++++
2 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)