mm/page_alloc.c: do not loop over ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS without triggering reclaim
__alloc_pages_slowpath is looping over ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS requests if
__GFP_NOFAIL is requested. This is fragile because we are basically
relying on somebody else to make the reclaim (be it the direct reclaim
or OOM killer) for us. The caller might be holding resources (e.g.
locks) which block other other reclaimers from making any progress for
example. Remove the retry loop and rely on __alloc_pages_slowpath to
invoke all allowed reclaim steps and retry logic.
We have to be careful about __GFP_NOFAIL allocations from the
PF_MEMALLOC context even though this is a very bad idea to begin with
because no progress can be gurateed at all. We shouldn't break the
__GFP_NOFAIL semantic here though. It could be argued that this is
essentially GFP_NOWAIT context which we do not support but PF_MEMALLOC
is much harder to check for existing users because they might happen
deep down the code path performed much later after setting the flag so
we cannot really rule out there is no kernel path triggering this
combination.
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 file changed