Re: GFP_ATOMIC page allocation failures.

Nick Piggin
2008-04-03T05:58:06Z

On Thursday 03 April 2008 05:18, Jeff Garzik wrote:

> Turning to Nick's comment,
>
> > It's still actually nice to know how often it is happening even for
> > these known good sites because too much can indicate a problem and
> > that you could actually bring performance up by tuning some things.
>
> then create a counter or acculuation buffer somewhere.
>
> We don't need spew every time there is memory pressure of this magnitude.

Not a complete solution. Counter would be nice, but you need backtraces
and want a way to more proactively warn the user/tester/developer.

I agree that I don't exactly like adding nowarns around, and I don't think
places like driver writers should have to know about this stuff.

> IMO there are much better ways than printk(), to inform tasks, and
> humans, of allocation failures.

I think with a tweaked warning message, a ratelimited printk is OK.