On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 11:43 -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
Yes, its usually only observed right after alloc. Its basically an extra
return value.
Daniel suggested it was about saving page flags, _maybe_. The value is
1) rare and 2) usually only interesting right after alloc. So wasting a
precious page flag which would keep this state for the duration of the
whole allocation seemed like a waste.
-