Re: [PATCH] scsi: fix sense_slab/bio swapping livelock

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, 8 Apr 2008, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> 
> I wonder if we can get away with a SLAB_IO flag that you can use to annotate
> caches that participate in writeout and the allocator could keep some spare
> pages around that can be handed out for them in case of OOM...

Actually, I don't think this is SLAB-specific, since there are potentially 
the same issues for pages.

I suspect the right thing to do is not to mark them for "IO", but mark 
them for "short-lived", and allow short-lived allocations that don't have 
extended lifetimes to succeed even when a "real" allocation wouldn't.

When we are under memory pressure, a normal allocation generally needs to 
clear up enough memory from elsewhere to succeed. But a short-lived 
allocation without any long-term lifetimes would be known to release its 
memory back to the pool, so it can be allowed to go ahead when a normal 
memory allocation would not.

Examples of short-lived allocations:
 - IO requests
 - temporary network packets that don't get queued up (eg "ACK" packet) as 
   opposed to those that do get queued (incoming _or_ outgoing queues)
 - things like the temporary buffers for "getname()/putname()" etc.

That said, even a lot of temporary allocations can at times have issues. 
If your IO layer is dead, your IO request queues that _should_ have been 
very temporary may end up staying around for a long time. But I do think 
that it makes sense to prioritize allocations that are known to be short- 
lived.

(It might also allows us to allocate them from different pools and just 
generally have other heuristics for cache behaviour - short-lived 
allocations simply have different behaviour)

			Linus