From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 09:42:17 -0800 From: "Martin J. Bligh" Subject: Re: [PATCH] fix spurious OOM kills Message-ID: <318860000.1100194936@[10.10.2.4]> In-Reply-To: <20041111165050.GA5822@x30.random> References: <20041111112922.GA15948@logos.cnet> <20041111154238.GD18365@x30.random> <20041111123850.GA16349@logos.cnet> <20041111165050.GA5822@x30.random> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Andrea Arcangeli , Marcelo Tosatti Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, Nick Piggin , Rik van Riel , Martin MOKREJ? , tglx@linutronix.de List-ID: >> > I disagree about the design of killing anything from kswapd. kswapd is >> > an async helper like pdflush and it has no knowledge on the caller (it >> > cannot know if the caller is ok with the memory currently available in >> > the freelists, before triggering the oom). >> >> If zone_dma / zone_normal are below pages_min no caller is "OK with >> memory currently available" except GFP_ATOMIC/realtime callers. > > If the GFP_DMA zone is filled, and nobody allocates with GFP_DMA, > nothing should be killed and everything should run fine, how can you > get this right from kswapd? Technically, that seems correct, but does it really matter much? We're talking about "it's full of unreclaimable stuff" vs "it's full of unreclaimable stuff and someone tried to allocate a page". So the difference is only ever one page, right? Doesn't really seem worth worrying about - we'll burn that in code space for the algorithms to do this ;-) M. -- 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