Re: upcoming kerneloops.org item: get_page_from_freelist

[Pavel Machek]

On Sun 2009-06-28 11:01:42, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 28 Jun 2009, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > 
> > Ok, so we should re-add that 4MB buffer to suspend, so that
> > allocations work even during that, right?
> 
> Pavel, you really are a one-trick pony, aren't you?
> 
> Give it up. Return to your pet worry when there are any actual reports. As 
> you have been told several times.

How do you report something that results in black screen during
suspend in 1/100 of attempts?

> The _other_ part of memory management that you and Andrew seem to be 
> ignoring is that it's very robust, and keeps extra memory around, and just 
> generally does the right thing. We don't generally pre-allocate anything, 
> because we don't need to.
> 
> Almost the _only_ way to run out of memory is to have tons and tons of 
> dirty pages around. Yes, it can happen. But if it happens, you're almost 
> guaranteed to be screwed anyway. The whole VM is designed around the 
> notion that most of memory is just clean caches, and it's designed around 
> that simply because if it's not true, the VM freedom is so small that 
> there's not a lot a VM can reasonably do.

Well, or you can have machine with not nearly enough memory (like 16MB
system), or huge 32-bit highmem system (32GB).

But it is true that I did not see OOM for quite long time.
									Pavel
-- 
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