From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: kanoj@google.engr.sgi.com (Kanoj Sarcar) Message-Id: <199906282138.OAA36935@google.engr.sgi.com> Subject: Re: filecache/swapcache questions [RFC] [RFT] [PATCH] kanoj-mm12-2.3.8 Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 14:38:43 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: from "Chuck Lever" at Jun 28, 99 05:32:05 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Chuck Lever Cc: andrea@suse.de, torvalds@transmeta.com, sct@redhat.com, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: > > (i also tried down_trylock, but discarded it.) > > well, except that kswapd itself doesn't free any memory. it simply copies > data from memory to disk. shrink_mmap() actually does the freeing, and > can do this with minimal locking, and from within regular application > processes. when a process calls shrink_mmap(), it will cause some pages > to be made available to GFP. > The page is not really free for reallocation, unless kswapd can push out the contents to disk, right? Which means, kswapd should have as minimal sleep/memallocation points as possible ... Kanoj kanoj@engr.sgi.com > if you need evidence that shrink_mmap() will keep a system running without > swapping, just run 2.3.8 :) :) > > come to think of it, i don't think there is a safety guarantee in this > mechanism to prevent a lock-up. i'll have to think more about it. > -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://humbolt.geo.uu.nl/Linux-MM/