On Thu, 12 May 2011 18:10:38 +0200 Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > More fuel to this discussion with commit 6d4831c2 > > Something is wrong with high order allocations, on some machines. > > Maybe we can find real cause instead of limiting us to use order-0 pages > in the end... ;) > > commit 6d4831c283530a5f2c6bd8172c13efa236eb149d > Author: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Date: Wed Apr 27 15:26:41 2011 -0700 > > vfs: avoid large kmalloc()s for the fdtable Well, it's always been the case that satisfying higher-order allocations take a disproportionate amount of work in page reclaim. And often causes excessive reclaim. That's why we've traditionally worked to avoid higher-order allocations, and this has always been a problem with slub. But the higher-order allocations shouldn't cause the VM to melt down. We changed something, and now it melts down. Changing slub to avoid that meltdown doesn't fix the thing we broke. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html