On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 04:47 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > So...  why not just remove the setting of __GFP_NORETRY?  Why is it
> > wrong to oom-kill things in this case?
>
> When the 16MB zone overflows (which can be common in some workloads)
> calling the OOM killer is pretty useless because it has barely any
> real user data [only exception would be the "only 16MB" case Alan
> mentioned]. Killing random processes in this case is bad.
>
> I think for 16MB __GFP_NORETRY is ok because there should be
> nothing freeable in there so looping is useless. Only exception would be the
> "only 16MB total" case again but I'm not sure 2.6 supports that at all
> on x86.
>
> On the other hand d_a_c() does more allocations than just 16MB, especially
> on 64bit and the other zones need different strategies.

Okay, so how about this then ?
Signed-off-by: NIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>