On Tue, Feb 24, 2026 at 06:03:13AM -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Tue, Feb 24, 2026 at 01:22:36PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote: > > One thing that we could do to improve __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL resp. > > __GFP_NORETRY is to use NOWAIT allocation semantic for page table > > allocations as those could be achieved by scoped allocation context. > > This could cause pre-mature failure after the whole bunch of memory has > > already been allocated for the backing pages but considering that page > > table allocations should be more and more rare over system runtime it > > might be just a reasonable workaround. WDYT? > > Why bother? __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL has pretty lose semantics. Trying > too hard to allocate PTEs is not breaking the overall concept. >
One thing __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL is very clear about is to not trigger the oom-killer which is not the case for GFP_KERNEL. There are users who explicitly use __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL to avoid oom-killer. Mikulas, is that the reason you are using __GFP_RETRY_MAYFAIL in your use-case?
