Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 9 Oct 2001 10:06:36 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 9 Oct 2001 10:06:26 -0400 Received: from perninha.conectiva.com.br ([200.250.58.156]:20239 "HELO perninha.conectiva.com.br") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id ; Tue, 9 Oct 2001 10:06:13 -0400 Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2001 10:44:37 -0200 (BRST) From: Marcelo Tosatti To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Andrea Arcangeli , lkml Subject: pre6 VM issues Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi, I've been testing pre6 (actually its pre5 a patch which Linus sent me named "prewith 16GB of RAM (thanks to OSDLabs for that), and I've found out some problems. First of all, we need to throttle normal allocators more often and/or update the low memory limits for normal allocators to a saner value. I already said I think allowing everybody to eat up to "freepages.min" is too low for a default. I've got atomic memory failures with _22GB_ of swap free (32GB total): eth0: can't fill rx buffer (force 0)! Another issue is the damn fork() special case. Its failing in practice: bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory Also with _LOTS_ of swap free. (gigs of them) Linus, we can introduce a "__GFP_FAIL" flag to be used by _everyone_ which wants to do higher order allocations as an optimization (eg allocate big scatter-gather tables or whatever). Or do you prefer to make the fork() allocation a separate case ? I'll take a closer look at the code now and make the throttling/limits to what I think is saner for a default. - 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/