On 8/9/07, Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> wrote:
PF_MEMALLOC is not such a bad thing. It will usually be less code
than mempool for the same use case, besides being able to handle a
wider range of problems. We introduce __GPF_MEMALLOC for situations
where the need for reserve memory is locally known, as in the network
stack, which is similar or identical to the use case for mempool. One
could reasonably ask why we need mempool with a lighter alternative
available. But this is a case of to each their own I think. Either
technique will work for reserve management.
You can fix reclaim as much as you want and the basic deadlock will
still not go away. When you finally do get to writing something out,
memory consumers in the writeout path are going to cause problems,
which this patch set fixes.
Agreed that the idea of mempool always sounded strange, and we show
how to get rid of them, but that is not the immediate purpose of this
patch set.
Regards,
Daniel
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