On Wed, 9 May 2001, Mark Hemment wrote:

On Tue, 8 May 2001, David S. Miller wrote: 

quoted

Actually, the change was made because it is illogical to try only
once on multi-order pages.  Especially because we depend upon order
1 pages so much (every task struct allocated).  We depend upon them
even more so on sparc64 (certain kinds of page tables need to be
allocated as 1 order pages).

The old code failed _far_ too easily, it was unacceptable.

Why put some strange limit in there?  Whatever number you pick
is arbitrary, and I can probably piece together an allocation
state where the choosen limit is too small.

  Agreed, but some allocations of non-zero orders can fall back to other
schemes (such as an emergency buffer, or using vmalloc for a temp
buffer) and don't want to be trapped in __alloc_pages() for too long.

  Could introduce another allocation flag (__GFP_FAIL?) which is or'ed
with a __GFP_WAIT to limit the looping?

__GFP_FAIL is in the -ac tree already and it is being used by the bounce
buffer allocation code. 



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