The reserve is proportionally distributed over all !highmem zones in the system. So we need to allow an emergency allocation access to all zones. In order to do that we need to break out of any mempolicy boundaries we might have. In my opinion that does not break mempolicies as those are user oriented and not system oriented. That is, system allocations are not guaranteed to be within mempolicy boundaries. For instance IRQs do not even have a mempolicy. So breaking out of mempolicy boundaries for 'rare' emergency allocations, which are always system allocations (as opposed to user) is ok. Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx> --- mm/page_alloc.c | 7 +++++++ 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+) diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c index 9883cf7..981272d 100644 --- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -2347,6 +2347,13 @@ rebalance: /* Allocate without watermarks if the context allows */ if (alloc_flags & ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS) { + /* + * Ignore mempolicies if ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS on the grounds + * the allocation is high priority and these type of + * allocations are system rather than user orientated + */ + zonelist = node_zonelist(numa_node_id(), gfp_mask); + page = __alloc_pages_high_priority(gfp_mask, order, zonelist, high_zoneidx, nodemask, preferred_zone, migratetype); -- 1.7.9.2 -- 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>