Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: Introduce GFP_PANIC for early-boot allocations

Andrew Morton
2009-05-08T21:02:04Z

On Fri, 08 May 2009 18:10:28 +0300
Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> wrote:

> +#define GFP_PANIC (__GFP_NOFAIL | __GFP_NORETRY)

urgh, you have to be kidding me. This significantly worsens complexity
and risk in core MM and it's just yuk.

I think we can justify pulling such dopey party tricks to save
pageframe space, or bits in page.flags and such. But just to save a
scrap of memory which would have been released during boot anwyay?
Don't think so.

I'd suggest panic_if_null(). Or just leave everything alone - it's
hardly a pressing problem.