From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755525AbYEaXrr (ORCPT ); Sat, 31 May 2008 19:47:47 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753618AbYEaXrj (ORCPT ); Sat, 31 May 2008 19:47:39 -0400 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:44876 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751593AbYEaXrj (ORCPT ); Sat, 31 May 2008 19:47:39 -0400 Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 16:47:12 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Jeremy Fitzhardinge Cc: Jeff Garzik , Jens Axboe , LKML , Ian Campbell Subject: Re: [PATCH 5 of 5] xen: Avoid allocations causing swap activity on the resume path Message-Id: <20080531164712.2788baf2.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <4841240A.1000008@goop.org> References: <4840B0C5.4020606@pobox.com> <48411F70.5020100@goop.org> <20080531025949.7c8b17bc.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <4841240A.1000008@goop.org> X-Mailer: Sylpheed 2.4.8 (GTK+ 2.12.5; x86_64-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 List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sat, 31 May 2008 11:10:18 +0100 Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote: > > Whether you should also add __GFP_HIGH to cause the page allocation to > > bite harder into the page reserves is unclear to me, sorry. > > > > Well, if the allocation fails the machine is dead in the water, because > it probably can't go on without its devices. I think it's worth eating > to the reserves to avoid that. (I'll have a close look to only add it > to allocations which are really unrecoverable if they fail.) OK. I don't actually have a clue what you're doing here. Restoring a virtual machine from disk/network or something like that? It might be appropriate to do a big memory-reclaim before starting the operation, along the lines of suspend-to-disk - go off and allocate (and possible pin) sufficient memroy for the entire operation before actually starting it?