On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Daniel Rodrick wrote: > "The mask GFP_NOFS to kmalloc specifies that the allocation can block > and can initiate disk I/O, if it must, but will not initiate a > filesystem operation. This is the flag to use in filesystem code when > you cannot start another filesystem operation." > But I could not understand why and how could a filesystem request be > initiated in order to free memory (the case avoided by GFP_NOFS)? > What am I missing here? The statement does not specifically talk about freeing the memory. The GFP_NOFS is intended to prevent cross-fs deadlocks during (not only) page writeouts. This has been discussed recently on LKML. Read the thread at http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/7/26/185 -- JiKos. -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
