On Wed, 3 Oct 2012, Stanislaw Gruszka wrote:

> So, can this problem be solved like on below patch, or I should rather
> split firmware loading into chunks similar like was already iwlwifi did?
> 
> diff --git a/drivers/net/wireless/iwlegacy/common.h b/drivers/net/wireless/iwlegacy/common.h
> index 5f50177..1b58222 100644
> --- a/drivers/net/wireless/iwlegacy/common.h
> +++ b/drivers/net/wireless/iwlegacy/common.h
> @@ -2247,7 +2247,7 @@ il_alloc_fw_desc(struct pci_dev *pci_dev, struct fw_desc *desc)
> 
>  	desc->v_addr =
>  	    dma_alloc_coherent(&pci_dev->dev, desc->len, &desc->p_addr,
> -			       GFP_KERNEL);
> +			       GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_REPEAT);
>  	return (desc->v_addr != NULL) ? 0 : -ENOMEM;
>  }
> 

I think this will certainly make memory compaction more aggressive by 
avoiding the logic to defer calling compaction in the page allocator, but 
because we lack lumpy reclaim this still has a higher probability of 
failing than it had in the past because it will fail if 128KB of memory is 
reclaimed that may not happen to be contiguous for an order-5 allocation 
to succeed.