kmalloc: return NULL instead of link failure
authorJeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com>
Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:48:59 +0000 (23:48 +0200)
committerPekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:48:59 +0000 (23:48 +0200)
commit1cf3eb2ff6b0844c678f2f48d0053b9d12b7da67
tree58a0a517bfd6703bf89e310173703d229389b8d4
parenta6525042bfdfcab128bd91fad264de10fd24a55e
kmalloc: return NULL instead of link failure

The SLAB kmalloc with a constant value isn't consistent with the other
implementations because it bails out with __you_cannot_kmalloc_that_much
rather than returning NULL and properly allowing the caller to fall back
to vmalloc or take other action.  This doesn't happen with a non-constant
value or with SLOB or SLUB.

Starting with 2.6.28, I've been seeing build failures on s390x.  This is
due to init_section_page_cgroup trying to allocate 2.5MB when the max size
for a kmalloc on s390x is 2MB.

It's failing because the value is constant.  The workarounds at the call
size are ugly and the caller shouldn't have to change behavior depending
on what the backend of the API is.

So, this patch eliminates the link failure and returns NULL like the other
implementations.

Signed-off-by: Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org> [2.6.28.x]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
include/linux/slab_def.h