From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1422636AbWBHXgd (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Feb 2006 18:36:33 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1422638AbWBHXgd (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Feb 2006 18:36:33 -0500 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:50576 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1422636AbWBHXgc (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Feb 2006 18:36:32 -0500 Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2006 15:35:51 -0800 From: Andrew Morton To: Andi Kleen Cc: clameter@engr.sgi.com, pj@sgi.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Terminate process that fails on a constrained allocation Message-Id: <20060208153551.04ee0c67.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: <200602082341.02243.ak@suse.de> References: <20060208133909.183f19ea.akpm@osdl.org> <200602082341.02243.ak@suse.de> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 1.0.4 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Andi Kleen wrote: > > > Unfortunately Andrew's point with the GFP_NOFS still applies :/ > But I would consider any caller of this not handling NULL be broken. Sure. > Andrew do you have any stronger evidence it's a real problem? No. About a million years ago I had a make-alloc_pages-fail-at-1%-rate debug patch. Doing that again would be an interesting exercise. Another option is to only fail userspace allocations (__GFP_HIGHMEM is set, or a new flag in GFP_HIGHUSER). For the workloads which the NUMA guys care about I expect this is a 99% solution and the amount of code which it puts at risk is vastly less.