On Mon, 11 Apr 2016, Michal Hocko wrote: > From: Michal Hocko <[email protected]> > > __GFP_REPEAT has a rather weak semantic but since it has been introduced > around 2.6.12 it has been ignored for low order allocations. Yet we have > the full kernel tree with its usage for apparently order-0 allocations. > This is really confusing because __GFP_REPEAT is explicitly documented > to allow allocation failures which is a weaker semantic than the current > order-0 has (basically nofail). > > Let's simply drop __GFP_REPEAT from those places. This would allow > to identify place which really need allocator to retry harder and > formulate a more specific semantic for what the flag is supposed to do > actually. > > Cc: [email protected] > Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
I did exactly this before, and Andrew objected saying that __GFP_REPEAT may not be needed for the current page allocator's implementation but could with others and that setting __GFP_REPEAT for an allocation provided useful information with regards to intent. At the time, I attempted to eliminate __GFP_REPEAT entirely.
