On Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 03:13:37PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote: > I do not see any scheduler guys Cced and it would be really great to get > their opinion here. > > On Mon 10-12-18 11:36:39, Daniel Vetter wrote: > > In some special cases we must not block, but there's not a > > spinlock, preempt-off, irqs-off or similar critical section already > > that arms the might_sleep() debug checks. Add a non_block_start/end() > > pair to annotate these. > > > > This will be used in the oom paths of mmu-notifiers, where blocking is > > not allowed to make sure there's forward progress. > > Considering the only alternative would be to abuse > preempt_{disable,enable}, and that really has a different semantic, I > think this makes some sense. The cotext is preemptible but we do not > want notifier to sleep on any locks, WQ etc. I'm confused... what is this supposed to do? And what does 'block' mean here? Without preempt_disable/IRQ-off we're subject to regular preemption and execution can stall for arbitrary amounts of time. The Changelog doesn't yield any clues.