Re: OOM fixes 2/5

[Andi Kleen]

Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxx> writes:

> Just that it throws away a bunch of potentially usable memory.  In three
> years I've seen zero reports of any problems which would have been solved
> by increasing the protection ratio.

We ran into a big problem with this on x86-64. The SUSE installer
would load the floppy driver during installation. Floppy driver would
try to allocate some pages with GFP_DMA and on a small memory x86-64
system (256-512MB) the OOM killer would always start to kill things
trying to free some DMA pages. This was quite a show stopper
because you effectively couldn't install.

So at least for GFP_DMA it seems to be definitely needed.

-Andi
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