Re: [PATCH] mm: limit lowmem_reserve

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Fri Apr 07 2006 - 21:44:40 EST


Con Kolivas wrote:
On Saturday 08 April 2006 10:55, Nick Piggin wrote:

Con Kolivas wrote:

On Friday 07 April 2006 22:40, Nick Piggin wrote:

How would zone_watermark_ok always fail though?

Withdrew this patch a while back; ignore

Well, whether or not that particular patch isa good idea, it
is definitely a bug if zone_watermark_ok could ever always
fail due to lowmem reserve and we should fix it.


Ok. I think I presented enough information for why I thought zone_watermark_ok would fail (for ZONE_DMA). With 16MB ZONE_DMA and a vmsplit of 3GB we have a lowmem_reserve of 12MB. It's pretty hard to keep that much ZONE_DMA free, I don't think I've ever seen that much free on my ZONE_DMA on an ordinary desktop without any particular ZONE_DMA users. Changing the tunable can make the lowmem_reserve larger than ZONE_DMA is on any vmsplit too as far as I understand the ratio.


Umm, for ZONE_DMA allocations, ZONE_DMA isn't a lower zone. So that
12MB protection should never come into it (unless it is buggy?).

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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