Re: GFP_ATOMIC page allocation failures.

[Jeff Garzik]

Nick Piggin wrote:
> 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.

No objections here, and agreed on all points.

Though IMO adding __GFP_NOWARN to netdev_alloc_skb() falls into that 
category (should not generally be in a driver or driver API).

	Jeff




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