Re: [PATCH] Remove OOM killer from try_to_free_pages / all_unreclaimablebraindamage

[Nick Piggin]

Hugh Dickins wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>
> > all allocations should have a failure path to avoid deadlocks. But in
> > the meantime __GFP_REPEAT is at least localizing the problematic places ;)
>
> Problematic, yes: don't overlook that GFP_REPEAT and GFP_NOFAIL _can_
> fail, returning NULL: when the process is being OOM-killed (PF_MEMDIE).

Yeah right you are. I think NOFAIL is a bug and should really not fail.
It looks like it is only used in fs/jbd/*, and things will crash if it
fails. Maybe they're only called from the kjournald threads and can't
be OOM killed, but that is still a pretty subtle dependancy.

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