On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, Konstantin Khlebnikov wrote:
Order of sizeof(struct kmem_cache) can be bigger than PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER, thus there is a good chance of unsuccessful allocation. With __GFP_REPEAT buddy-allocator will reclaim/compact memory more aggressively. Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@xxxxxxxxxx> --- mm/slab.c | 2 +- 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) diff --git a/mm/slab.c b/mm/slab.c index d96e223..53bddc8 100644 --- a/mm/slab.c +++ b/mm/slab.c @@ -2304,7 +2304,7 @@ kmem_cache_create (const char *name, size_t size, size_t align, gfp = GFP_NOWAIT; /* Get cache's description obj. */ - cachep = kmem_cache_zalloc(&cache_cache, gfp); + cachep = kmem_cache_zalloc(&cache_cache, gfp | __GFP_REPEAT); if (!cachep) goto oops;
The changelog isn't that convincing, really. This is kmem_cache_create() so I'm surprised we'd ever get NULL here in practice. Does this fix some problem you're seeing? If this is really an issue, I'd blame the page allocator as GFP_KERNEL should just work.
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