From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <418CAD0C.3030109@cyberone.com.au> Date: Sat, 06 Nov 2004 21:53:00 +1100 From: Nick Piggin MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [PATCH] Remove OOM killer from try_to_free_pages / all_unreclaimable braindamage References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Hugh Dickins Cc: Andrea Arcangeli , Jesse Barnes , Marcelo Tosatti , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: Hugh Dickins wrote: >On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > >>all allocations should have a failure path to avoid deadlocks. But in >>the meantime __GFP_REPEAT is at least localizing the problematic places ;) >> > >Problematic, yes: don't overlook that GFP_REPEAT and GFP_NOFAIL _can_ >fail, returning NULL: when the process is being OOM-killed (PF_MEMDIE). > > Yeah right you are. I think NOFAIL is a bug and should really not fail. It looks like it is only used in fs/jbd/*, and things will crash if it fails. Maybe they're only called from the kjournald threads and can't be OOM killed, but that is still a pretty subtle dependancy. -- 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