Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753227AbYAWVOi (ORCPT ); Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:14:38 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752092AbYAWVOa (ORCPT ); Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:14:30 -0500 Received: from relay1.sgi.com ([192.48.171.29]:48075 "EHLO relay.sgi.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752080AbYAWVO3 (ORCPT ); Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:14:29 -0500 Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:14:26 -0800 (PST) From: Christoph Lameter X-X-Sender: clameter@schroedinger.engr.sgi.com To: Pekka Enberg cc: Nishanth Aravamudan , Mel Gorman , akpm@linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org, "Aneesh Kumar K.V" , KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki , lee.schermerhorn@hp.com, Linux MM , Olaf Hering Subject: Re: [PATCH] Fix boot problem in situations where the boot CPU is running on a memoryless node In-Reply-To: <84144f020801231302g2cafdda9kf7f916121dc56aa5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: References: <20080123075821.GA17713@aepfle.de> <20080123121459.GA18631@aepfle.de> <20080123125236.GA18876@aepfle.de> <20080123135513.GA14175@csn.ul.ie> <20080123155655.GB20156@csn.ul.ie> <20080123195220.GB3848@us.ibm.com> <84144f020801231302g2cafdda9kf7f916121dc56aa5@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 945 Lines: 20 On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Pekka Enberg wrote: > I think Mel said that their configuration did work with 2.6.23 > although I also wonder how that's possible. AFAIK there has been some > changes in the page allocator that might explain this. That is, if > kmem_getpages() returned pages for memoryless node before, bootstrap > would have worked. Regular kmem_getpages is called with GFP_THISNODE set. There was some breakage in 2.6.22 and before with GFP_THISNODE returning pages from the wrong node if a node had no memory. So it may have worked accidentally and in an unsafe manner because the pages would have been associated with the wrong node which could trigger bug ons and locking troubles. -- 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/