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Commit 20a77776 authored by Nicholas Piggin's avatar Nicholas Piggin Committed by Linus Torvalds
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[PATCH] mempool: simplify alloc


Mempool is pretty clever.  Looks too clever for its own good :) It
shouldn't really know so much about page reclaim internals.

- don't guess about what effective page reclaim might involve.

- don't randomly flush out all dirty data if some unlikely thing
  happens (alloc returns NULL). page reclaim can (sort of :P) handle
  it.

I think the main motivation is trying to avoid pool->lock at all costs.
However the first allocation is attempted with __GFP_WAIT cleared, so it
will be 'can_try_harder' if it hits the page allocator.  So if allocation
still fails, then we can probably afford to hit the pool->lock - and what's
the alternative?  Try page reclaim and hit zone->lru_lock?

A nice upshot is that we don't need to do any fancy memory barriers or do
(intentionally) racy access to pool-> fields outside the lock.

Signed-off-by: default avatarNick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
parent b84a35be
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