Re: [PATCH] allocation looping + kswapd CPU cycles

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Thu, 10 May 2001, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 03:22:57PM -0300, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> 
> > Initially I thought about __GFP_FAIL to be used by writeout routines which
> > want to cluster pages until they can allocate memory without causing any
> > pressure to the system. Something like this: 
> > 
> > while ((page = alloc_page(GFP_FAIL))
> > 	add_page_to_cluster(page);
> > write_cluster(); 
> 
> Isn't that an orthogonal decision?  You can use __GFP_FAIL with or
> without __GFP_WAIT or __GFP_IO, whichever is appropriate.

Correct. 

Back to the main discussion --- I guess we could make __GFP_FAIL (with
__GFP_WAIT set :)) allocations actually fail if "try_to_free_pages()" does
not make any progress (ie returns zero). But maybe thats a bit too
extreme.

What do you think?