We have observed page allocations failures of order 4 during core dump while trying to allocate vma_filesz. This results in a useless core file of size 0. To improve reliability use vmalloc(). Note that the vmalloc() allocation is bounded by sysctl_max_map_count, which is 65,530 by default. So with a 4k page size, and 8 bytes per seg, this is a max of 128 pages or an order 7 allocation. Other parts of the core dump path, such as fill_files_note() are already using vmalloc() for presumably similar reasons. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1479745791-17611-1-git-send-email-jbaron@akamai.com Signed-off-by: Jason Baron <jbaron@akamai.com> Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>