On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> __GFP_NORETRY:
>
> Don't oom-kill and don't retry. For swapoff.
>
> I've implemented a __GFP_REPEAT, and don't like it, because it blurs the
> __GFP_REPEAT and __GFP_NOFAIL requirements. I'll add __GFP_NORETRY and we
> can then pass that into read_swap_cache_async() and handle the error.
>
> Sound good?
Probably not. I did try something like that over a year ago, and it
didn't work as well as I'd expected. One problem, I think, is that
while it's going through pages already in the swap cache, swapoff
may not need to allocate memory itself; but meanwhile other tasks
are trying to allocate memory and getting OOMkilled. I think that
argues that swapoff does need to register itself for the duration
with the OOMkiller: a PF_ flag achieves that but a __GFP flag does not.
Hugh
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