Re: [PATCH 4/6] PM/Hibernate: Rework shrinking of memory

[Pavel Machek]

On Thu 2009-05-14 19:49:52, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Thursday 14 May 2009, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > 
> > > > > > The main point (I thought) was to remove shrink_all_memory().  Instead,
> > > > > > we're retaining it and adding even more stuff?
> > > > > 
> > > > > The idea is that afterwards we can drop shrink_all_memory() once the
> > > > > performance problem has been resolved.  Also, we now allocate memory for the
> > > > > image using GFP_KERNEL instead of doing it with GFP_ATOMIC after freezing
> > > > > devices.  I'd think that's an improvement?
> > > > 
> > > > Dunno.  GFP_KERNEL might attempt to do writeback/swapout/etc, which
> > > > could be embarrassing if the devices are frozen.
> > > 
> > > They aren't, because the preallocation is done upfront, so once the OOM killer
> > > has been taken care of, it's totally safe. :-)
> > 
> > As is GFP_ATOMIC. Except that GFP_KERNEL will cause catastrophic
> > consequences when accounting goes wrong. (New kernel's idea of what is
> > on disk will differ from what is _really_ on disk.)
> > 
> > If accounting is right, GFP_ATOMIC and GFP_KERNEL is equivalent.
> > 
> > If accounting is wrong, GFP_ATOMIC will fail with NULL, while
> > GFP_KERNEL will do something bad.
> > 
> > I'd keep GFP_ATOMIC (or GFP_NOIO or similar). 
> 
> Repeating myself: with this and the next patch applied, we preallocate memory
> for the image _before_ freezing devices and therefore it is safe to use
> GFP_KERNEL, because the OOM killer has been taken care of by [3/6].

Aha, I misparsed the sentecnes above.

Acked-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@xxxxxx>
									Pavel

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