Re: [PATCH] Remove OOM killer from try_to_free_pages / all_unreclaimable braindamage

Nick Piggin
2004-11-06T10:53:10Z

Hugh Dickins wrote:

>On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>
>>all allocations should have a failure path to avoid deadlocks. But in
>>the meantime __GFP_REPEAT is at least localizing the problematic places ;)
>>
>
>Problematic, yes: don't overlook that GFP_REPEAT and GFP_NOFAIL _can_
>fail, returning NULL: when the process is being OOM-killed (PF_MEMDIE).
>
>

Yeah right you are. I think NOFAIL is a bug and should really not fail.
It looks like it is only used in fs/jbd/*, and things will crash if it
fails. Maybe they're only called from the kjournald threads and can't
be OOM killed, but that is still a pretty subtle dependancy.