Re: scheduler went mad?

[Alan Cox]

> 2.4.3-pre6 quietly made a very significant change there:
> it used to say "if (!order) goto try_again;" and now just
> says "goto try_again;".  Which seems very sensible since
> __GFP_WAIT is set, but I do wonder if it was a safe change.
> We have mechanisms for freeing pages (order 0), but whether
> any higher orders come out of that is a matter of chance.

The fundamental problem is that it should say

	wait_for_mm_progress();
	goto try_again;

and we dont have that facility right now. At that point the looping on
failed allocations problem is ok as we will allow someone to make progress.
That leaves the bounce buffers for > 800Mb RAM which currently are seriously
horked and will loop and may even stack overflow by inspection