> > Now there is a anon dirty limit since a few releases, but I'm not > > fully convinced it solves the problem completely. > > A gut feeling or is there more?
Lots of other subsystem can allocate a lot of memory and they usually don't cooperate and have similar dirty limit concepts. So you could run out of usable memory anyways and then have a similar issue. For example a flood of network packets could always steal your GFP_ATOMIC pools very quickly in the background (gigabit or 10gig can transfer a lot of data very quickly) Also iirc try_to_free_pages() is not completely fair and might fail under extreme load for some requesters. Not requiring memory allocation for any IO would be certainly safer. Anyways, it's a theoretic question because you can't sleep in there anyways unless something drastic changes in the driver interfaces. -Andi - 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/
