Subject: Re: [Patch v2] skbuff: Hide GFP_ATOMIC page allocation failures for dropped packets

From: Rik van Riel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 May 2013 17:32:07 -0400

On 05/28/2013 12:29 PM, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-05-28 at 13:15 -0300, Rafael Aquini wrote:
>
>> The real problem seems to be that more and more the network stack (drivers, perhaps)
>> is relying on chunks of contiguous page-blocks without a fallback mechanism to
>> order-0 page allocations. When memory gets fragmented, these alloc failures
>> start to pop up more often and they scare ordinary sysadmins out of their paints.
>>
>
> Where do you see that ?
>
> I see exactly the opposite trend.
>
> We have less and less buggy drivers, and we want to catch last
> offenders.

These backtraces would still get printed out for drivers
that DO do the right thing and fall back to smaller
allocations.

The initial failed large allocation would cause a backtrace.