From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 16:48:23 -0400 From: Benjamin LaHaise Subject: Re: [CFT][PATCH] smoother VM for -ac Message-ID: <20011010164823.A17860@redhat.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: ; from riel@conectiva.com.br on Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 05:25:30PM -0300 Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rik van Riel Cc: kernelnewbies@nl.linux.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Alan Cox List-ID: On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 05:25:30PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote: > 4) in page_alloc.c, the "slowdown" reschedule has been > made stronger by turning it into a try_to_free_pages(), > under memory load, this results in allocators calling > try_to_free_pages() when the amount of work to be done > isn't too bad yet and pretty much guarantees them they'll > get to do their allocation immediately afterwards ... > statistics make sure that the memory hogs are slowed down > much more than well-behaved programs There's a small problem with this one: I know that during testing of earlier 2.4 kernels we saw a livelock which was caused by the vm subsystem spinning without scheduling. This can happen in a couple of cases like NFS where another task has to be allowed to run in order to make progress in clearing pages. -ben -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/