Re: [PATCH 02/10] mm: system wide ALLOC_NO_WATERMARK

[Daniel Phillips]

On Monday 06 August 2007 11:42, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > Currently your system likely would have died here, so ending up
> > with a reserve page temporarily on the wrong node is already an
> > improvement.
>
> The system would have died? Why?

Because a block device may have deadlocked here, leaving the system 
unable to clean dirty memory, or unable to load executables over the 
network for example.

> The application in the cpuset that ran out of memory should have died
> not the system. 

If your "application" is a virtual block device then you can land in 
deep doodoo.

Regards,

Daniel
-
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/