Re: [PATCH] slub: Don't panic for memcg kmem cache creation failure

[Dave Hansen]

On 6/20/19 7:44 AM, Shakeel Butt wrote:
>> I am wondering whether SLAB_PANIC makes sense in general though. Why is
>> it any different from any other essential early allocations? We tend to
>> not care about allocation failures for those on bases that the system
>> must be in a broken state to fail that early already. Do you think it is
>> time to remove SLAB_PANIC altogether?
>>
> That would need some investigation into the history of SLAB_PANIC. I
> will look into it.

I think it still makes sense for things like the vma, filp, dentry
caches.  If we don't
have those, we can't even execve("/sbin/init") so we shouldn't even bother
continuing to boot.

Maybe we should turn off SLAB_PANIC behavior after boot.  We don't want
a silly driver or filesystem module that's creating slabs to be causing
panic()s.