[PATCH] slab: do not panic when alloc_kmemlist fails and slab is up

[PATCH] slab: do not panic when alloc_kmemlist fails and slab is up

It is fairly easy to get a system to oops by simply sizing a cache via
/proc in such a way that one of the chaches (shared is easiest) becomes
bigger than the maximum allowed slab allocation size.  This occurs because
enable_cpucache() fails if it cannot reallocate some caches.

However, enable_cpucache() is used for multiple purposes: resizing caches,
cache creation and bootstrap.

If the slab is already up then we already have working caches.  The resize
can fail without a problem.  We just need to return the proper error code.
F.e.  after this patch:

# echo "size-64 10000 50 1000" >/proc/slabinfo
-bash: echo: write error: Cannot allocate memory

notice no OOPS.

If we are doing a kmem_cache_create() then we also should not panic but
return -ENOMEM.

If on the other hand we do not have a fully bootstrapped slab allocator yet
then we should indeed panic since we are unable to bring up the slab to its
full functionality.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Manfred Spraul <manfred@colorfullife.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>