On Mon, 2016-08-01 at 10:20 -0400, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello,
> > If any real IO depends on those devices then this is not sufficient and
> > they need some form of guarantee for progress (aka mempool).
>
> Oliver, Alan, what do you think? If USB itself can't operate without
> allocating memory during transactions, whatever USB storage drivers
It cannot. The IO must be described to the hardware with a data
structure in memory.
> are doing isn't all that meaningful. Can we proceed with the
> workqueue patches? Also, it could be that the only thing GFP_NOIO and
> GFP_ATOMIC are doing is increasing the chance of IO failures under
> memory pressure. Maybe it'd be a good idea to reconsider the
> approach?
We had actual deadlocks with GFP_KERNEL. It seems to me that the SCSI
layer can deal with IO that cannot be completed due to a lack of memory
at least somewhat, but a deadlock within a driver would obviously be
deadly. So I don't think that mempools would remove the need for
GFP_NOIO as there are places in usbcore we cannot enter the page
laundering path from. They are an additional need.
Regards
Oliver
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