Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261738AbVAGXnM (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 Jan 2005 18:43:12 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261737AbVAGXmA (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 Jan 2005 18:42:00 -0500 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:55016 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261730AbVAGXib (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 Jan 2005 18:38:31 -0500 Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 15:43:05 -0800 From: Andrew Morton To: Nikita Danilov Cc: pmarques@grupopie.com, linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, hch@infradead.org Subject: Re: [RFC] per thread page reservation patch Message-Id: <20050107154305.790b8a51.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: References: <20050103011113.6f6c8f44.akpm@osdl.org> <20050103114854.GA18408@infradead.org> <41DC2386.9010701@namesys.com> <1105019521.7074.79.camel@tribesman.namesys.com> <20050107144644.GA9606@infradead.org> <1105118217.3616.171.camel@tribesman.namesys.com> <41DEDF87.8080809@grupopie.com> <20050107132459.033adc9f.akpm@osdl.org> <20050107150315.3c1714a4.akpm@osdl.org> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.7 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i586-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1236 Lines: 32 Nikita Danilov wrote: > > > > > Why does the filesystem risk going oom during the rebalance anyway? Is it > > doing atomic allocations? > > No, just __alloc_pages(GFP_KERNEL, 0, ...) returns NULL. When this > happens, the only thing balancing can do is to panic. __alloc_pages(GFP_KERNEL, ...) doesn't return NULL. It'll either succeed or never return ;) That behaviour may change at any time of course, but it does make me wonder why we're bothering with this at all. Maybe it's because of the possibility of a GFP_IO failure under your feet or something? What happens if reiser4 simply doesn't use this code? If we introduce this mechanism, people will end up using it all over the place. Probably we could remove radix_tree_preload(), which is the only similar code I can I can immediately think of. Page reservation is not a bad thing per-se, but it does need serious thought. How does reiser4 end up deciding how many pages to reserve? Gross overkill? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/