Re: patch to give kmalloc a chance (RFC)

[Chris Wedgwood <cw@xxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 03:52:28PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

> For a NOFS allocation, simply retrying is a crude-but-effective fix.
> We have kicked kswapd and kswapd _does_ have __GFP_FS.

I wondered about this... and sleeping briefly isn't a bad if it
penalizes the memory hog processes (sure, this isn't guaranteed but
one hopes it happens more often than not).

> So things work out, as long as the filesystem doesn't hold locks
> which would prevent kswapd from being able to reclaim some memory.

What about swapping to a file on the fs?  Might this not be such a
lock?


  --cw