Re: [PATCH 3/8] Allow huge page allocations to use GFP_HIGH_MOVABLE

[Chris Friesen]

Mel Gorman wrote:

> Worse, the problem is to have high order contiguous blocks free at the 
> time of allocation without reclaim or migration. If the allocations were 
> not atomic, anti-fragmentation as it is today would be enough.

Has anyone looked at marking the buffers as "needs refilling" then kick 
off a kernel thread or something to do the allocations under GFP_KERNEL? 
 That way we avoid having to allocate the buffers with GFP_ATOMIC.

I seem to recall that the tulip driver used to do this.  Is it just too 
complicated from a race condition standpoint?

We currently see this issue on our systems, as we have older e1000 
hardware with 9KB jumbo frames.  After a while we just fail to allocate 
buffers and the system goes belly-up.

Chris
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