[$] Toward a real "too small to fail" rule

Kernel developers have long been told that any attempt to allocate memorymight fail, so their code must be prepared for memory to be unavailable.Informally, though, the kernel's memory-management subsystem implements apolicy whereby requests below a certain size will not fail (in processcontext, at least), regardless ofhow tight memory may be. A recent discussion on the linux-mm list haslooked at the idea of making the "too small tofail" rule a policy that developers can rely on.