From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 16:29:03 +0100 From: Andrea Arcangeli Subject: Re: [PATCH] Remove OOM killer from try_to_free_pages / all_unreclaimable braindamage Message-ID: <20041106152903.GA3851@dualathlon.random> References: <20041106015051.GU8229@dualathlon.random> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Hugh Dickins Cc: Nick Piggin , Jesse Barnes , Marcelo Tosatti , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 09:47:56AM +0000, Hugh Dickins wrote: > Problematic, yes: don't overlook that GFP_REPEAT and GFP_NOFAIL _can_ > fail, returning NULL: when the process is being OOM-killed (PF_MEMDIE). that looks weird, why that? The oom killer must be robust against a task not going anyway regardless of this (task can be stuck in nfs or similar). If a fail path ever existed, __GFP_NOFAIL should not have been used in the first place. I don't see many valid excuses to use __GFP_NOFAIL if we can return NULL without the caller running into an infinite loop. btw, PF_MEMDIE has always been racy in the way it's being set, so it can corrupt the p->flags, but the race window is very small to trigger it (and even if it triggers, it probably wouldn't be fatal). That's why I don't use PF_MEMDIE in 2.4-aa. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: aart@kvack.org