On Wed, 11 Mar 2015 16:54:52 -0400 Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxx> wrote: > as per discussion at LSF/MM summit few days back it seems there is a > general agreement on moving away from "small allocations do not fail" > concept. Such a change affects basically every part of the kernel and every kernel developer. I expect most developers will say "it works well enough and I'm not getting any bug reports so why should I spend time on this?". It would help if we were to explain the justification very clearly. https://lwn.net/Articles/636017/ is Jon's writeup of the conference discussion. Realistically, I don't think this overall effort will be successful - we'll add the knob, it won't get enough testing and any attempt to alter the default will be us deliberately destabilizing the kernel without knowing how badly :( I wonder if we can alter the behaviour only for filesystem code, so we constrain the new behaviour just to that code where we're having problems. Most/all fs code goes via vfs methods so there's a reasonably small set of places where we can call static inline void enter_fs_code(struct super_block *sb) { if (sb->my_small_allocations_can_fail) current->small_allocations_can_fail++; } that way (or something similar) we can select the behaviour on a per-fs basis and the rest of the kernel remains unaffected. Other subsystems can opt in as well. -- 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>