From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932115AbVHRC5e (ORCPT ); Wed, 17 Aug 2005 22:57:34 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932114AbVHRC5e (ORCPT ); Wed, 17 Aug 2005 22:57:34 -0400 Received: from cantor2.suse.de ([195.135.220.15]:36799 "EHLO mx2.suse.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932111AbVHRC5d (ORCPT ); Wed, 17 Aug 2005 22:57:33 -0400 Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 04:57:28 +0200 From: Andi Kleen To: Nick Piggin Cc: Andi Kleen , Eric Dumazet , Benjamin LaHaise , "David S. Miller" , netdev@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] struct file cleanup : the very large file_ra_state is now allocated only on demand. Message-ID: <20050818025727.GY3996@wotan.suse.de> References: <20050810164655.GB4162@linux.intel.com> <20050810.135306.79296985.davem@davemloft.net> <20050810211737.GA21581@linux.intel.com> <430391F1.9080900@cosmosbay.com> <20050817211829.GK27628@wotan.suse.de> <4303AEC4.3060901@cosmosbay.com> <20050817215357.GU3996@wotan.suse.de> <4303D90E.2030103@cosmosbay.com> <20050818010524.GW3996@wotan.suse.de> <4303F7E8.5030705@yahoo.com.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4303F7E8.5030705@yahoo.com.au> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > You don't want to always have bad performance though, so you > could attempt to allocate if either the pointer is null _or_ it > points to the global structure? Remember it's after a GFP_KERNEL OOM. If that fails most likely you have deadlocked somewhere else already because Linux's handling of that is so bad. Suboptimal readahead somewhere is the smallest of your problems. -Andi