Hi, as per discussion at LSF/MM summit few days back it seems there is a general agreement on moving away from "small allocations do not fail" concept. There are two patches in this series. The first one exports a sysctl knob which controls how hard small allocation (!__GFP_NOFAIL ones of course) retry when we get completely out of memory before the allocation fails. The default is still retry infinitely because we cannot simply change the 14+ years behavior right away. It will take years before all the potential fallouts are discovered and fixed and we can change the default value. The second patch is the first step in the transition plan. It changes the default but it is NOT an upstream material. It is aimed for brave testers who can cope with failures. I have talked to Andrew and he was willing to keep that patch in mmotm tree. It would be even better to have this in linux-next because the testing coverage would be even bigger. Dave Chinner has also shown an interest to integrate this into his xfstest farm. It would be great if Fenguang could add it into the zero testing project too (if the pushing the patch into linux-next would be too controversial). -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
