On Mon, 19 Aug 2024 at 13:24, David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Right, "warn + loop forever" is one alternative where you could at least > keep the system alive to some degree. Maybe. Or it might just lock up the machine. For small allocations looping forever is probably fine, because in practice there's always *something* that can be thrown out. But anything larger than order-3 (handwavy, but that was our historical limit, I think, and we call it PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER) has to fail at _some_ point, and the caller setting GFP_NOFAIL is just fantasy and "Daddy, I want a pony", and should be ignored. With a WARN_ON_ONCE(), by all means, so that people can see who the fantasist is. Linus