On March 7, 2002 05:19 pm, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Higher order allocation - imho we can fix that too, eventually, however it's a lot
> > more work. First we have to have reliable physical defragmentation.
> >
> > > And if we are OOM - we want to return NULL
> >
> > What good does that do?
>
> It allows us to continue. It avoids the deadlocks.
Could you describe the deadlock, please?
> It lets the caller make an intelligent decision.
I maintain it's the wrong interface, we're mixing two concepts together there:
- VM can't find blocks that are freeable, so fails and dumps the problem
on the caller, which has to busy wait. This sucks.
- The VM is under heavy load and the caller doesn't really need the memory
that badly because it has a fallback, the VM somehow knows this, so fails
the allocation and everybody is happy.
These should be separated, and we should fix the former.
-- Daniel - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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