On 05/25/2018 10:48 PM, Vlastimil Babka wrote: > On 05/25/2018 09:43 PM, Andrew Morton wrote: >> On Fri, 25 May 2018 15:08:53 +0200 Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> >>> we might consider this for 4.17 although I don't know if there's anything >>> currently broken. Stable backports should be more important, but will have to >>> be reviewed carefully, as the code went through many changes. >>> BTW I think that also the ac->preferred_zoneref reset is currently useless if >>> we don't also reset ac->nodemask from a mempolicy to NULL first (which we >>> probably should for the OOM victims etc?), but I would leave that for a >>> separate patch. >> >> Confused. If nothing is currently broken then why is a backport >> needed? Presumably because we expect breakage in the future? Can you >> expand on this? > > I mean that SLAB is currently not affected, but in older kernels than > 4.7 that don't yet have 511e3a058812 ("mm/slab: make cache_grow() handle > the page allocated on arbitrary node") it is. That's at least 4.4 LTS. > Older ones I'll have to check. So I've checked the non-EOL LTS's at kernel.org and: 4.16, 4.14, 4.9 - same as mainline (__GFP_THISNODE broken, but SLAB is OK) 4.4, 4.1, 3.16 - SLAB potentially broken if it makes an ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS allocation (our 4.4 kernel has backports that extend it to also !ALLOC_CPUSET so it's more likely).