473738eb78
Patch series "mm: give __GFP_REPEAT a better semantic".
The main motivation for the change is that the current implementation of
__GFP_REPEAT is not very much useful.
The documentation says:
* __GFP_REPEAT: Try hard to allocate the memory, but the allocation attempt
* _might_ fail. This depends upon the particular VM implementation.
It just fails to mention that this is true only for large (costly) high
order which has been the case since the flag was introduced. A similar
semantic would be really helpful for smal orders as well, though,
because we have places where a failure with a specific fallback error
handling is preferred to a potential endless loop inside the page
allocator.
The earlier cleanup dropped __GFP_REPEAT usage for low (!costly) order
users so only those which might use larger orders have stayed. One new
user added in the meantime is addressed in patch 1.
Let's rename the flag to something more verbose and use it for existing
users. Semantic for those will not change. Then implement low
(!costly) orders failure path which is hit after the page allocator is
about to invoke the oom killer. With that we have a good counterpart
for __GFP_NORETRY and finally can tell try as hard as possible without
the OOM killer.
Xfs code already has an existing annotation for allocations which are
allowed to fail and we can trivially map them to the new gfp flag
because it will provide the semantic KM_MAYFAIL wants. Christoph didn't
consider the new flag really necessary but didn't respond to the OOM
killer aspect of the change so I have kept the patch. If this is still
seen as not really needed I can drop the patch.
kvmalloc will allow also !costly high order allocations to retry hard
before falling back to the vmalloc.
drm/i915 asked for the new semantic explicitly.
Memory migration code, especially for the memory hotplug, should back
off rather than invoking the OOM killer as well.
This patch (of 6):
Commit
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README
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