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From: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
To: Marcelo Tosatti <marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com>
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, akpm@osdl.org
Subject: Re: Documentation/vm/balance really outdated
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 13:54:57 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20040825205457.GJ2793@holomorphy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20040825184520.GA23878@logos.cnet>

On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 03:45:20PM -0300, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> The file Documentation/vm/balance was written by Kanoj in 2000, and
> is completly outdated to what we have now.
> Last paragraph:
> pages_min/pages_low/pages_high/low_on_memory/zone_wake_kswapd: These are
> per-zone fields, used to determine when a zone needs to be balanced. When
> the number of pages falls below pages_min, the hysteric field low_on_memory
> gets set. This stays set till the number of free pages becomes pages_high.
> When low_on_memory is set, page allocation requests will try to free some
> pages in the zone (providing GFP_WAIT is set in the request). Orthogonal
> to this, is the decision to poke kswapd to free some zone pages. That
> decision is not hysteresis based, and is done when the number of free
> pages is below pages_low; in which case zone_wake_kswapd is also set.
> Should we just remove it? 

pages_min, pages_low, and pages_high are still in use, but with more
precisely-defined semantics. low_on_memory is gone, and min_free_kb,
overcommit_memory, and swappiness have arrived for different purposes.
I find the value of this documentation rather unclear particularly given
that it's not been examined in so long. Maybe kerneldoc is the way.


-- wli
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      parent reply	other threads:[~2004-08-25 20:54 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2004-08-25 18:45 Marcelo Tosatti
2004-08-25 20:46 ` Kanoj Sarcar
2004-08-25 20:54 ` William Lee Irwin III [this message]

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