On Sunday 10 May 2009, David Rientjes wrote: > On Sat, 9 May 2009, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > > > > This has been changed in the latest mmotm with Mel's page alloactor > > > patches (and I think yours should be based on mmotm). Specifically, > > > page-allocator-break-up-the-allocator-entry-point-into-fast-and-slow-paths.patch. > > > > > > Before his patchset, zonelists that had ZONE_OOM_LOCKED set for at least > > > one of their zones would unconditionally goto restart. Now, if > > > order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER, it gives up and returns NULL. Otherwise, > > > it does goto restart. > > > > > > So if your allocation has order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER, > > > > It doesn't. All of my allocations are of order 0. > > > > All order 0 allocations are implicitly __GFP_NOFAIL and will loop > endlessly unless they can't block. So if you want to simply prohibit the > oom killer from being invoked and not change the retry behavior, setting > ZONE_OOM_LOCKED for all zones will do that. If your machine hangs, it > means nothing can be reclaimed and you can't free memory via oom killing, > so there's nothing else the page allocator can do. But I want it to give up in this case instead of looping forever. Look. I have a specific problem at hand that I want to solve and the approach you suggested _clearly_ _doesn't_ _work_. I have also tried to explain to you why it doesn't work, but you're ingnoring it, so I really don't know what else I can say. OTOH, the approach suggested by Andrew _does_ _work_ regardless of your opinion about it. It's been tested and it's done the job 100% of the time. Go figure. And please stop beating the dead horse. Thanks, Rafael -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-testers" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
