Re: [patch 1/6] md: remove dependency on __GFP_NOFAIL

From: David Rientjes
Date: Mon Aug 23 2010 - 16:09:09 EST


On Mon, 23 Aug 2010, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Hows about you add a helper function
>
> void *[kmalloc|alloc_page]_retrying_forever_because_i_suck(lots of args)
>
> then convert the callsites to use that, then nuke __GFP_NOFAIL?
>

That would only serve as documentation of a caller that could potentially
loop forever waiting for memory (which I did by adding "/* FIXME: this may
potentially loop forever */") since all of the allocations in this
patchset never loop in the code that was added, they already loop forever
in the page allocator doing the same thing. The hope is that kswapd will
eventually be able to free memory since direct reclaim will usually fail
for GFP_NOFS and we simply need to wait long enough for there to be
memory.
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