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Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 23:00:14 +0100
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From: "Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk>
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Subject: Re: new kmod.c - debuggers and testers needed
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To: H.H.vanRiel@fys.ruu.nl
Cc: Perry Harrington <pedward@sun4.apsoft.com>, linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu, linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>
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Hi,

On Tue, 14 Apr 1998 20:02:09 +0200 (MET DST), Rik van Riel
<H.H.vanRiel@fys.ruu.nl> said:

> On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Perry Harrington wrote:
>> Threads
>> are useful in their appropriate context, and kswapd, and kmod would benefit
>> from them.

> Hmm, maybe it would be useful for kswapd and bdflush to fork()
> off threads to do the actual disk I/O, so the main thread won't
> be blocked and paused... This could remove some bottlenecks.

bdflush does nothing except IO, so there's no real reason to
twin-thread it.  kswapd does indeed benefit from a separate IO thread,
and I've already got patches which implement a kswiod for IO and a
kswapd for page scanning.  I'll post them once I've got them ready
against the latest kernel: my current patches for this code are pretty
old.

--Stephen