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When passed GFP flags that allow sleeping (such as GFP_NOIO), mempool_alloc() will never return NULL, it will wait until memory is available. This means that we don't need to handle failure, but that we do need to ensure one thread doesn't call mempool_alloc() twice on the one pool without queuing or freeing the first allocation. If multiple threads did this during times of high memory pressure, the pool could be exhausted and a deadlock could result. pnfs_generic_alloc_ds_commits() attempts to allocate from the nfs_commit_mempool while already holding an allocation from that pool. This is not safe. So change nfs_commitdata_alloc() to take a flag that indicates whether failure is acceptable. In pnfs_generic_alloc_ds_commits(), accept failure and handle it as we currently do. Else where, do not accept failure, and do not handle it. Even when failure is acceptable, we want to succeed if possible. That means both - using an entry from the pool if there is one - waiting for direct reclaim is there isn't. We call mempool_alloc(GFP_NOWAIT) to achieve the first, then kmem_cache_alloc(GFP_NOIO|__GFP_NORETRY) to achieve the second. Each of these can fail, but together they do the best they can without blocking indefinitely. The objects returned by kmem_cache_alloc() will still be freed by mempool_free(). This is safe as mempool_alloc() uses exactly the same function to allocate objects (since the mempool was created with mempool_create_slab_pool()). The object returned by mempool_alloc() and kmem_cache_alloc() are indistinguishable so mempool_free() will handle both identically, either adding to the pool or calling kmem_cache_free(). Also, don't test for failure when allocating from nfs_wdata_mempool. Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.com> Signed-off-by: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@primarydata.com>
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.