On Thu, 17 May 2007, Matt Mackall wrote: > Simply stated, the problem is sometimes it's impossible to free memory > without allocating more memory. Thus we must keep enough protected > reserve that we can guarantee progress. This is what mempools are for > in the regular I/O stack. Unfortunately, mempools are a bad match for > network I/O. > > It's absolutely correct that performance doesn't matter in the case > this patch is addressing. All that matters is digging ourselves out of > OOM. The box either survives the crisis or it doesn't.
Well we fail allocations in order to do so and these allocations may be even nonatomic allocs. Pretty dangerous approach. > It's also correct that we should hardly ever get into a situation > where we trigger this problem. But such cases are still fairly easy to > trigger in some workloads. Swap over network is an excellent example, > because we typically don't start swapping heavily until we're quite > low on freeable memory. Is it not possible to avoid failing allocs? Instead put processes to sleep? Run synchrononous reclaim? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
