Re: [PATCH] scsi: fix sense_slab/bio swapping livelock

From: Pekka Enberg
Date: Tue Apr 08 2008 - 17:13:42 EST


Christoph Lameter wrote:
Hmmmm... Peter has the most experience with these issues. Maybe the best would be to have this sort of logic in a more general way in the page allocator? Similar issues surely exist with the page allocator and a fix there would fix it for all users.

This needs some support in the slab allocator anyway. Keep in mind that the patch is specifically addressing writeback in OOM conditions so we must (1) prioritize GFP_TEMPORARY allocations over everyone else (which just get NULL) and (2) use the remaining available memory as efficiently as possible for _all_ GFP_TEMPORARY allocations.

Peter is, however, bringing up a good point that my patch doesn't actually _guarantee_ anything so I'm still wondering if this approach makes any sense... But I sure do like Linus' ideas of marking short-lived allocations and trying harder for them in OOM.

Pekka
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