On Tue, 16 Nov 2010, Ricardo M. Correia wrote: > > __GFP_REPEAT will retry the allocation indefinitely until the needed > > amount of memory is reclaimed without considering the order of the > > allocation; all orders of interest in your case are order-0, so it will > > loop indefinitely until a single page is reclaimed which won't happen with > > GFP_NOFS. Thus, passing the flag is the equivalent of asking the > > allocator to loop forever until memory is available rather than failing > > and returning to your error handling. > > When you say loop forever, you don't mean in a busy loop, right? > Assuming we sleep in this loop (which AFAICS it does), then it's OK for > us because memory will be freed asynchronously. > Yes, __GFP_REPEAT will only be effected if it's blockable, so the allocator will reschedule during the loop but not return until the allocation suceeds in this case since it's GFP_NOFS which significantly impacts the ability to reclaim memory. -- 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/ . Fight unfair telecom policy in Canada: sign http://dissolvethecrtc.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>