On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 03:23:50PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote: > From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> > > __GFP_REPEAT has a rather weak semantic but since it has been introduced > around 2.6.12 it has been ignored for low order allocations. > > PGALLOC_GFP uses __GFP_REPEAT but none of the allocation which uses > this flag is for more than order-2. This means that this flag has never > been actually useful here because it has always been used only for > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY requests. I'm unconvinced. Back in 2013, I was seeing a lot of failures, so: commit 8c65da6dc89ccb605d73773b1dd617e72982d971 Author: Russell King <rmk+kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Sat Nov 30 12:52:31 2013 +0000 ARM: pgd allocation: retry on failure Make pgd allocation retry on failure; we really need this to succeed otherwise fork() can trigger OOMs. Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Maybe something has changed again in the MM layer which makes this flag unnecessary again, and it was a temporary blip around that time, I don't know. -- RMK's Patch system: http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/developer/patches/ FTTC broadband for 0.8mile line: currently at 9.6Mbps down 400kbps up according to speedtest.net. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>