Re: [patch 1/5] mm: add nofail variants of kmalloc kcalloc and kzalloc

On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 07:24 -0400, Ted Ts'o wrote:

Part of the problem is that we have a few places in the kernel where
failure is really not an option --- or rather, if we're going to fail
while we're in the middle of doing a commit, our choices really are
(a) retry the loop in the jbd layer (which Andrew really doesn't
like), (b) keep our own private cache of free memory so we don't fail
and/or loop, (c) fail the file system and mark it read-only, or (d)
panic. 

d) do the allocation before you're committed to going fwd and can still
fail and back out.