Re: [GIT PULL v2] Early SLAB fixes for 2.6.31

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, 17 Jun 2009, Nick Piggin wrote:
> 
> In some cases perhaps it is difficult. In others it should be
> pretty natural. Lots of memory allocating paths pass gfp
> a long way down the stack.

I agree that some cases would be pretty natural. In fact, that's what we 
started out doing. On the x86 side, we didn't have a lot of issues in 
testing, and we fixed them up by using GFP_NOWAIT (see for example 
cpupri_init() in kernel/sched_cpupri.c, or init_irq_default_affinity() in 
kernel/irq/handle.c - both of which were fixed up in that phase).

Those paths, in fact, in general already had "bootmem" flags etc. And x86 
doesn't need to initialize a lot of state at bootup. 

Then Ben happened, and crazy PPC ioremap crap. 

So the problem is exactly that it was perfectly natural to pass down a gfp 
or other flag in _some_ cases. And then in a few cases it's much more 
painful.

		Linus
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/