Re: [PATCH 5 of 5] xen: Avoid allocations causing swap activity onthe resume path

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Sat May 31 2008 - 19:47:47 EST


On Sat, 31 May 2008 11:10:18 +0100 Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > Whether you should also add __GFP_HIGH to cause the page allocation to
> > bite harder into the page reserves is unclear to me, sorry.
> >
>
> Well, if the allocation fails the machine is dead in the water, because
> it probably can't go on without its devices. I think it's worth eating
> to the reserves to avoid that. (I'll have a close look to only add it
> to allocations which are really unrecoverable if they fail.)

OK.

I don't actually have a clue what you're doing here. Restoring a
virtual machine from disk/network or something like that?

It might be appropriate to do a big memory-reclaim before starting the
operation, along the lines of suspend-to-disk - go off and allocate
(and possible pin) sufficient memroy for the entire operation before
actually starting it?

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