From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 15:22:57 -0300 (BRT) From: Marcelo Tosatti Subject: Re: [PATCH] allocation looping + kswapd CPU cycles In-Reply-To: <20010510205204.O16590@redhat.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: "Stephen C. Tweedie" Cc: Mark Hemment , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Thu, 10 May 2001, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote: > Hi, > > On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 01:43:46PM -0300, Marcelo Tosatti wrote: > > > No. __GFP_FAIL can to try to reclaim pages from inactive clean. > > > > We just want to avoid __GFP_FAIL allocations from going to > > try_to_free_pages(). > > Why? __GFP_FAIL is only useful as an indication that the caller has > some magic mechanism for coping with failure. Hum, not _only_. Initially I thought about __GFP_FAIL to be used by writeout routines which want to cluster pages until they can allocate memory without causing any pressure to the system. Something like this: while ((page = alloc_page(GFP_FAIL)) add_page_to_cluster(page); write_cluster(); See? > There's no other information passed, so a brief call to > try_to_free_pages is quite appropriate. This obviously depends on what we decide __GFP_FAIL will be used for. -- 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.eu.org/Linux-MM/