Re: [PATCH] fork() failing

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> 
> On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, David S. Miller wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> 
> Well, it's not really any _new_ special casing - we've always had the
> special case for order-0, the patch just expands it to order-1 too.
> 
> That said, I think a separate flag saying "don't try too hard", which can
> be used for all orders, including 0 and 1, and just says that "ok, we want
> you to balance things, but if this allocation fails that's not a big
> deal".
> 
> So the flag would just always be implicit in allocations of higher orders,
> because big orders are basically impossible to guarantee..

Read my last mail on this thread... A single flag saying "we can fail
easily" does not sound good to me.

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.