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From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>,
	Aucoin <aucoin@houston.rr.com>,
	'Nick Piggin' <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>,
	'Tim Schmielau' <tim@physik3.uni-rostock.de>,
	Linux Memory Management List <linux-mm@kvack.org>
Subject: Re: la la la la ... swappiness
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2006 12:02:56 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20061205120256.b1db9887.akpm@osdl.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0612051130200.18569@schroedinger.engr.sgi.com>

On Tue, 5 Dec 2006 11:32:21 -0800 (PST)
Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > > We do not support swapping / reclaim for huge pages.
> > 
> > Well, Louis doesn't actually _want_ swapping or reclaim on them. He just 
> > wants the system to run well with the remaining 400MB of memory in his 
> > machine.
> > 
> > Which it doesn't. It just OOM's for some reason.
> 
> If you take huge chunks of memory out of a zone then the dirty limits as 
> well as the min free kbytes etc are all off. As a result the VM may 
> behave strangely.  F.e. too many dirty pages may cause an OOM since we do 
> not enter synchrononous writeout during reclaim.

yes, it's quite possible that this setup would cause the page reclaim
arithmetic to go wrong.

But otoh, it's a very common scenario, and nobody has observed it before. 
For example:

akpm2:/home/akpm# echo 4000 > /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages 

Free memory on this box instantly fell from 7G down to ~250MB.  It's now
happily chuggling its way through a `dbench 512' run.

But this is a 64-bit machine.  Could be that there are problems on 32-bit.

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  reply	other threads:[~2006-12-05 20:02 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
     [not found] <200612050641.kB56f7wY018196@ms-smtp-06.texas.rr.com>
2006-12-05 16:17 ` Linus Torvalds
2006-12-05 16:59   ` Andrew Morton
2006-12-05 17:41     ` aucoin, Andrew Morton
2006-12-05 18:31       ` Christoph Lameter
2006-12-05 18:44         ` Linus Torvalds
2006-12-05 19:32           ` Christoph Lameter
2006-12-05 20:02             ` Andrew Morton [this message]
2006-12-05 20:15               ` Christoph Lameter
2006-12-05 20:48                 ` Andrew Morton
2006-12-05 20:59                   ` Christoph Lameter
2006-12-05 21:39                     ` Andrew Morton
2006-12-05 23:20                       ` Christoph Lameter
2006-12-12 15:12                         ` Aucoin
2006-12-05 20:52               ` Andrew Morton
2006-12-05 20:39           ` aucoin, Linus Torvalds

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