__alloc_pages_may_oom makes sure to skip the OOM killer depending on the
allocation request.  This includes lowmem requests, costly high order
requests and others.  For a long time __GFP_NOFAIL acted as an override
for all those rules.  This is not documented and it can be quite
surprising as well.  E.g.  GFP_NOFS requests are not invoking the OOM
killer but GFP_NOFS|__GFP_NOFAIL does so if we try to convert some of
the existing open coded loops around allocator to nofail request (and we
have done that in the past) then such a change would have a non trivial
side effect which is far from obvious.  Note that the primary motivation
for skipping the OOM killer is to prevent from pre-mature invocation.

The exception has been added by commit 82553a93 ("oom: invoke oom
killer for __GFP_NOFAIL").  The changelog points out that the oom killer
has to be invoked otherwise the request would be looping for ever.  But
this argument is rather weak because the OOM killer doesn't really
guarantee a forward progress for those exceptional cases:

- it will hardly help to form costly order which in turn can result in
  the system panic because of no oom killable task in the end - I believe
  we certainly do not want to put the system down just because there is a
  nasty driver asking for order-9 page with GFP_NOFAIL not realizing all
  the consequences.  It is much better this request would loop for ever
  than the massive system disruption

- lowmem is also highly unlikely to be freed during OOM killer

- GFP_NOFS request could trigger while there is still a lot of memory
  pinned by filesystems.

This patch simply removes the __GFP_NOFAIL special case in order to have a
more clear semantic without surprising side effects.
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Reported-by: Nils Holland <nholland@tisys.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Hillf Danton <hillf.zj@alibaba-inc.com>
Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>