Re: [PATCH] 2.2.14 VM fix #3

[Rik van Riel]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Jan 2000 14:34:14 +0100 (CET), Andrea Arcangeli
> <[e-mail]> said:
> 
> > Sorry but I will never agree with your patch. The GFP_KERNEL change is not
> > something for 2.2.x. We have major deadlocks in getblk for example and you
> > may trigger tham more easily forbidding GFP_MID allocations to
> > succeed. 
> 
> Agreed, definitely.

OTOH, 2.2.1{3,4} have seen deadlocks because GFP_KERNEL
allocations had eaten up all of memory and a PF_MEMALLOC
allocation couldn't get through. It has also DoSed some
servers where the network driver got temporarily confused
when a GFP_ATOMIC allocation failed.

> > Also killing the low_on_memory will harm performance. You doesn't seems to
> > see what such bit (that should be a per-process thing) is good for.
> 
> Also agreed --- removing the per-process flag will just penalise
> _all_ processes when we enter thrashing.

Except that it never was a per-process flag...
(so we didn't lose anything there)

regards,

Rik
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