Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 18 Oct 2001 12:25:25 -0700 (PDT) | Subject | Re: [PATCH] fork() failing | From | "David S. Miller" <> |
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From: Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo@conectiva.com.br> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 15:04:15 -0200 (BRST)
As you know, we currently allow 1-order allocations to fail easily.
However, there is one special case of 1-order allocations which cannot fail: fork.
Here is the tested patch against pre4.
There are also some platforms using 1-order allocations for page tables as well.
But I don't know if I agree with this special casing. Why not just put something into the GFP flag bits which distinguishes between high order allocations which are "critical" and others which are "don't try too hard".
BTW, such a scheme could be useful for page cache pre-fetching. If you use a high order allocation, it is more likely that all of the pages in that prefetch will fit into the same kernel TLB mapping. We could use a GFP_NONCRITICAL for something like this.
Franks a lot, David S. Miller davem@redhat.com - 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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