Re: refill_inactive()

From: Andrea Arcangeli (andrea@suse.de)
Date: Tue Sep 26 2000 - 12:56:12 EST


On Tue, Sep 26, 2000 at 10:12:44AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> It should probably just be a GFP_USER (ie not the GFP_KERNEL "try very
> hard").

GFP_KERNEL and GFP_USER have to try equally very hard until the machine runs
_truly_ out of memory.

When the machine runs truly out of memory I think it would be better in 2.4.x
not to cause a shortage of the atomic pool, but to make GFP_KERNEL work like
GFP_USER (so not giving it access to the atomic pool). This is risky if some
GFP_KERNEL allocation is deadlock prone (like raid1 before 2.4.x) and that's why
it's better not to do that in 2.2.x to decrease the probability to hit those
deadlocks.

GFP_BUFFER (getblk) should still access the whole atomic pool instead
(because it's deadlock prone and fixing it would impact all fs).

Andrea
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