Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 18 Oct 2001 16:48:37 -0200 (BRST) | From | Marcelo Tosatti <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] fork() failing |
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On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote: > > > Imagine people changing the point where the > > > > if ((gfp_mask & __GFP_FAIL)) > > return; > > > > check is done (inside the freeing routines). > > > > I would like to have a _defined_ meaning for a "fail easily" allocation, > > and a simple unique __GFP_FAIL flag can't give us that IMO. > > Actually, I guess we could define this to be the same point > where we'd end up freeing memory in order to satisfy our > allocation. > > This would result in __GFP_FAIL meaning "give me memory if > it's available, but don't waste time freeing memory if we > don't have enough free memory now". > > Space-wise these semantics could change (say, pages_low > vs. pages_min), but they'll stay the same when you look at > "how hard to try" or "how much effort to spend".
Just remember that if we give __GFP_FAIL a "give me memory if its available" meaning we simply can't use it for stuff like pagecache prefetching --- its _too_ fragile.
Thats why I think we need the freeing levels, and thats why I think we should left all of that for 2.5. :)
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