mm/page_alloc.c: do not loop over ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS without triggering reclaim
__alloc_pages_slowpath is looping over ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS requests if __GFP_NOFAIL is requested. This is fragile because we are basically relying on somebody else to make the reclaim (be it the direct reclaim or OOM killer) for us. The caller might be holding resources (e.g. locks) which block other other reclaimers from making any progress for example. Remove the retry loop and rely on __alloc_pages_slowpath to invoke all allowed reclaim steps and retry logic. We have to be careful about __GFP_NOFAIL allocations from the PF_MEMALLOC context even though this is a very bad idea to begin with because no progress can be gurateed at all. We shouldn't break the __GFP_NOFAIL semantic here though. It could be argued that this is essentially GFP_NOWAIT context which we do not support but PF_MEMALLOC is much harder to check for existing users because they might happen deep down the code path performed much later after setting the flag so we cannot really rule out there is no kernel path triggering this combination. Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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