On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 6:42 PM, Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > When under significant memory pressure, a process enters direct reclaim > and immediately afterwards tries to allocate a page. If it fails and no > further progress is made, it's possible the system will go OOM. However, > on systems with large amounts of memory, it's possible that a significant > number of pages are on per-cpu lists and inaccessible to the calling > process. This leads to a process entering direct reclaim more often than > it should increasing the pressure on the system and compounding the problem. > > This patch notes that if direct reclaim is making progress but > allocations are still failing that the system is already under heavy > pressure. In this case, it drains the per-cpu lists and tries the > allocation a second time before continuing. > > Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@xxxxxxxxx> IPI overhead would be good rather than going OOM or nopage. In addition, here isn't a hot path and frequent case. -- Kind regards, Minchan Kim -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>