Re: [RFC] usb: host: u132-hcd: Remove deprecated create_singlethread_workqueue

[Alan Stern]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2016, Tejun Heo wrote:

> Hello, Alan.
> 
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 02:54:51PM -0400, Alan Stern wrote:
> > > Hmm... I didn't know the whole USB stack could operate without
> > > allocating memory.  Does usb stack have mempools and stuff all the way
> > > through?
> > 
> > No -- the USB stack does need to allocate memory in order to operate.  
> > But it is careful to use GFP_NOIO or GFP_ATOMIC for allocations that
> > might be on the block-device path.
> 
> Hmm... That doesn't really make them dependable during memory reclaim.

True.  But it does mean that they can't cause a deadlock by waiting
indefinitely for some other memory to be paged out to the very device
they are on the access pathway for.

> What happens when those allocations fail?

The same thing that happens when any allocation fails -- the original
I/O request fails with -ENOMEM or the equivalent.  In the case of 
usb-storage, this is likely to trigger error recovery, which will need 
to allocate memory of its own...  A bad situation to get into.

Alan Stern