Re: refill_inactive()

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>]

On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> Hmmm, doesn't GFP_BUFFER simply imply that we cannot
> allocate new buffer heads to do IO with??

No.

New buffer heads would be ok - recursion is fine in theory, as long as it
is bounded, and we might bound it some other way (I don't think we
_should_ do recursion here due to the stack limit, but at least it's not
a fundamental problem).

The fundamental problem is that GFP_BUFFER allocations are often done with
some critical filesystem lock held. Which means that we cannot call down
to the filesystem to free up memory.

The name is a misnomer, partly due to historical reasons (the buffer cache
used to be fragile, and if you free'd buffer cache pages while you were
trying to allocate new ones you could cause BadThings(tm) to happen), but
partly just because the only _user_ of it is the buffer cache. 

In theory, filesystems could use it for any other allocations that they
do, but in practice they don't, and the only allocations they do in
critical regions is the buffer allocation. And as this thread has
discussed, even that is really more of a bug than a feature.

		Linus

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