tree 755ea207b968af12e195f6fb3e3b52b4d68e8630
parent ad915c432eccb482427c1bbd77c74e6f7bfe60b3
author David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> 1281399534 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1281411896 -0700

oom: avoid oom killer for lowmem allocations

If memory has been depleted in lowmem zones even with the protection
afforded to it by /proc/sys/vm/lowmem_reserve_ratio, it is unlikely that
killing current users will help.  The memory is either reclaimable (or
migratable) already, in which case we should not invoke the oom killer at
all, or it is pinned by an application for I/O.  Killing such an
application may leave the hardware in an unspecified state and there is no
guarantee that it will be able to make a timely exit.

Lowmem allocations are now failed in oom conditions when __GFP_NOFAIL is
not used so that the task can perhaps recover or try again later.

Previously, the heuristic provided some protection for those tasks with
CAP_SYS_RAWIO, but this is no longer necessary since we will not be
killing tasks for the purposes of ISA allocations.

high_zoneidx is gfp_zone(gfp_flags), meaning that ZONE_NORMAL will be the
default for all allocations that are not __GFP_DMA, __GFP_DMA32,
__GFP_HIGHMEM, and __GFP_MOVABLE on kernels configured to support those
flags.  Testing for high_zoneidx being less than ZONE_NORMAL will only
return true for allocations that have either __GFP_DMA or __GFP_DMA32.

Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>