[linux-mm-cc] swap-device write failure under low memory

Uma shankar shankar.vk at gmail.com
Wed Jul 7 04:30:25 EDT 2010


Hello nitin,

                Occasionally,  xvMalloc  will  try to grow the pool.
This memory allocation can fail  under low memory.

This will be informed to the kernel as  a "device write" failure.
The page which was being written will not be reclaimed, but
the kernel will  continue to  try swap out of other pages ( as kernel
thinks that swap has free space. )

Wont this lead  to the reclaim code ( kswapd  or the direct reclaim
path )  hogging  the processor for some time before  OOM is
finally announced ?

And what if a NOFAIL allocation attempt results in this ?

Have you analysed this scenario ?

                              rgds,
                              shankar


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