diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/vm')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/vm/balance | 14 |
1 files changed, 8 insertions, 6 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/balance b/Documentation/vm/balance index c46e68cf9344..964595481af6 100644 --- a/Documentation/vm/balance +++ b/Documentation/vm/balance @@ -1,12 +1,14 @@ Started Jan 2000 by Kanoj Sarcar <kanoj@sgi.com> -Memory balancing is needed for non __GFP_WAIT as well as for non -__GFP_IO allocations. +Memory balancing is needed for !__GFP_ATOMIC and !__GFP_KSWAPD_RECLAIM as +well as for non __GFP_IO allocations. -There are two reasons to be requesting non __GFP_WAIT allocations: -the caller can not sleep (typically intr context), or does not want -to incur cost overheads of page stealing and possible swap io for -whatever reasons. +The first reason why a caller may avoid reclaim is that the caller can not +sleep due to holding a spinlock or is in interrupt context. The second may +be that the caller is willing to fail the allocation without incurring the +overhead of page reclaim. This may happen for opportunistic high-order +allocation requests that have order-0 fallback options. In such cases, +the caller may also wish to avoid waking kswapd. __GFP_IO allocation requests are made to prevent file system deadlocks. |