From: Daniel Phillips <phillips@phunq.net>
To: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 02/10] mm: system wide ALLOC_NO_WATERMARK
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 11:48:43 -0700
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Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       linux-mm@kvack.org, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       Daniel Phillips <phillips@google.com>,
       Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>, Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>,
       Lee Schermerhorn <Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com>,
       Steve Dickson <SteveD@redhat.com>
References: <20070806102922.907530000@chello.nl> <200708061121.50351.phillips@phunq.net> <Pine.LNX.4.64.0708061141511.3152@schroedinger.engr.sgi.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0708061141511.3152@schroedinger.engr.sgi.com>
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On Monday 06 August 2007 11:42, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > Currently your system likely would have died here, so ending up
> > with a reserve page temporarily on the wrong node is already an
> > improvement.
>
> The system would have died? Why?

Because a block device may have deadlocked here, leaving the system 
unable to clean dirty memory, or unable to load executables over the 
network for example.

> The application in the cpuset that ran out of memory should have died
> not the system. 

If your "application" is a virtual block device then you can land in 
deep doodoo.

Regards,

Daniel
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