From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S964871AbVKAAkq (ORCPT ); Mon, 31 Oct 2005 19:40:46 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751362AbVKAAkq (ORCPT ); Mon, 31 Oct 2005 19:40:46 -0500 Received: from smtp203.mail.sc5.yahoo.com ([216.136.129.93]:165 "HELO smtp203.mail.sc5.yahoo.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S1751361AbVKAAkp (ORCPT ); Mon, 31 Oct 2005 19:40:45 -0500 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com.au; h=Received:Message-ID:Date:From:User-Agent:X-Accept-Language:MIME-Version:To:CC:Subject:References:In-Reply-To:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; b=0CqkB5xcMrKr5AjNqEKrf7IMIwNUOapWSOQMIyivWv/BxQnHofK16vhBI5rZEbGKmesMP1toLmqeNzoiwSmFNnqtkuk5UcioQuyywmYXq13bYoDP4jaD2px0gNls8SnthngzpxziR3YKq4X8jN8a4CDLMtSiFn42c7QPIgsJTso= ; Message-ID: <4366AFC7.3060505@yahoo.com.au> Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 10:59:03 +1100 From: Nick Piggin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051007 Debian/1.7.12-1 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Martin J. Bligh" CC: Andrew Morton , kravetz@us.ibm.com, mel@csn.ul.ie, linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, lhms-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Lhms-devel] [PATCH 0/7] Fragmentation Avoidance V19 References: <20051030183354.22266.42795.sendpatchset@skynet.csn.ul.ie><20051031055725.GA3820@w-mikek2.ibm.com><4365BBC4.2090906@yahoo.com.au><20051030235440.6938a0e9.akpm@osdl.org><27700000.1130769270@[10.10.2.4]> <20051031112409.153e7048.akpm@osdl.org> <3660000.1130787652@flay> In-Reply-To: <3660000.1130787652@flay> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Martin J. Bligh wrote: > --On Monday, October 31, 2005 11:24:09 -0800 Andrew Morton wrote: >>I suspect this would all be a non-issue if the net drivers were using >>__GFP_NOWARN ;) > > > We still need to allocate them, even if it's GFP_KERNEL. As memory gets > larger and larger, and we have no targetted reclaim, we'll have to blow > away more and more stuff at random before we happen to get contiguous > free areas. Just statistics aren't in your favour ... Getting 4 contig > pages on a 1GB desktop is much harder than on a 128MB machine. > However, these allocations are not of the "easy to reclaim" type, in which case they just use the regular fragmented-to-shit areas. If no contiguous pages are available from there, then an easy-reclaim area needs to be stolen, right? In which case I don't see why these patches don't have similar long term failure cases if there is strong demand for higher order allocations. Prolong things a bit, perhaps, but... > Is not going to get better as time goes on ;-) Yeah, yeah, I know, you > want recreates, numbers, etc. Not the easiest thing to reproduce in a > short-term consistent manner though. > Regardless, I think we need to continue our steady move away from higher order allocation requirements. -- SUSE Labs, Novell Inc. Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com