On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:15:29AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Explicitly adding the emails of other people involved with that commit
> and the original oom thread to make sure people are aware, since this
> didn't get any response.
> 
> Commit cc87317726f8 fixed some behavior, but also seems to have turned
> an oom situation into a complete hang. So presumably we shouldn't loop
> *forever*. Hmm?

It seems we are between a rock and a hard place here, as we reverted
specifically to that endless looping on request of filesystem people.
They said[1] they rely on these allocations never returning NULL, or
they might fail inside a transactions and corrupt on-disk data.

Huang, against which kernels did you first run this test on this exact
setup?  Is there a chance you could try to run a kernel without/before
9879de7373fc?  I want to make sure I'm not missing something, but all
versions preceding this commit should also have the same hang.  There
should only be a tiny window between 9879de7373fc and cc87317726f8 --
v3.19 -- where these allocations are allowed to fail.

[1] https://www.marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=142450545009301&w=3