Re: TAKE - Locking fixes for the xfs I/O path

[Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Steve Lord wrote:

> Finally change the flags on memory allocations which happen under filesystem
> locks (usually the xfs inode lock) to use GFP_BUFFER rather than GFP_KERNEL.
> This stops the memory reclaim threads from pushing back into the filesystem
> again to free memory and deadlocking.
> 
> I have not yet managed to deadlock a system due to memory pressure with
> these changes. dbench throughput also appears to improve.

Steve, 

Have to check if, under 2.4.1, with low memory machines under heavy IO no
XFS allocations fails. 

We are not waiting for kswapd anymore, so the  !__GFP_IO allocations are
more fragile.