Re: [patch] my latest oom stuff

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Tue, 3 Nov 1998 16:48:46 -0800 (PST)


On Wed, 4 Nov 1998, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>
> I thought to change that but I was not sure (and infact some email ago I
> asked that to you too). I have not changed that myself because I was
> worryed that userspace allocation could be too much light. It would be
> nice to know if using GFP_USER and disabling kswapd (at the end of
> vmscan.c) causes process to segfaults (so that we can know if a real time
> process can alloc/swapout memory safely).

I wonder why it wasn't GFP_USER - that's exactly what the thing is there
for, and I don't know when it was changed. Probably with the new page
cache or something. I just looked at the memory allocator, and it looked
like it was doing the right thing, and it _was_ - but because it was
called with GFP_KERNEL it tried harder than it should have to return a
good page even when it ran out of memory.

Anyway, I made a pre-patch-2.1.127-6 and put it on ftp.kernel.org (pre-4
and pre-5 have been my internal pre-patches and don't show up there). This
has the timeout code basic fixes and the mm fixes, and doesn't fall over
for me with Andreas memory load case.

It also feels pretty good under other load. Do you concur?

Linus

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