From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2001 13:26:30 -0400 From: Chris Mason Subject: Re: [RFC][DATA] re "ongoing vm suckage" Message-ID: <292520000.997205190@tiny> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Linus Torvalds , Ben LaHaise Cc: Daniel Phillips , Rik van Riel , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Tuesday, August 07, 2001 10:04:05 AM -0700 Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote: >> >> Sorry, I should have warned people: pre5 is a test-release that was >> intended solely for Leonard Zubkoff who has been helping with trying to >> debug a FS livelock condition. > > So I _think_ that what happens is: > - alloc_pages() itself isn't making any progress, because it's called > with GFP_NOFS and thus cannot touch a lot of the pages. > - we wake up kswapd to try to help, but kswapd doesn't do anything > because it thinks things are fine. Which filesystem? If its one of the journaled ones, other processes might be waiting on the log trying to flush things out. -chris -- 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/