Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 6 Nov 2004 16:29:03 +0100 | From | Andrea Arcangeli <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Remove OOM killer from try_to_free_pages / all_unreclaimable braindamage |
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On Sat, Nov 06, 2004 at 09:47:56AM +0000, Hugh Dickins wrote: > Problematic, yes: don't overlook that GFP_REPEAT and GFP_NOFAIL _can_ > fail, returning NULL: when the process is being OOM-killed (PF_MEMDIE).
that looks weird, why that? The oom killer must be robust against a task not going anyway regardless of this (task can be stuck in nfs or similar). If a fail path ever existed, __GFP_NOFAIL should not have been used in the first place. I don't see many valid excuses to use __GFP_NOFAIL if we can return NULL without the caller running into an infinite loop.
btw, PF_MEMDIE has always been racy in the way it's being set, so it can corrupt the p->flags, but the race window is very small to trigger it (and even if it triggers, it probably wouldn't be fatal). That's why I don't use PF_MEMDIE in 2.4-aa. - 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/
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