Hi,

Attached is patch that does the included part below.
With the addition of some questions to Riel and addition of
inactive_target in SysRq-M output.

Back to the included part. It is from __alloc_pages_limit
with the original code - won't the test fail always until
free_pages == pages_min + 8 resulting in only allocating from
free pages - no reclaims, might be ok.

When this situation is reached it will only reclaim_pages
and the different limits will give little effect.

The patch below will give a more interesting allocations.
When water_mark is PAGES_HIGH then first alloc pages from
free until pages_high, then if direct_reclaim is allowed
from inactive_clean else continue to use free pages.
If the freeable pages gets below pages_high, retry with
new limit...

It gives comparable performance with plain test10, but with
more pages free. Limits can be trimmed down...

Note: that you could/should remove the first loop in
__alloc_pages, not tried it should really be done with
this patch - problem is where to start kreclaimd...

/RogerL

--- linux/mm/page_alloc.c.orig  Mon Oct 16 23:54:03 2000
+++ linux/mm/page_alloc.c       Tue Oct 17 01:16:13 2000
@@ -264,7 +264,8 @@ static struct page * __alloc_pages_limit
                if (z->free_pages + z->inactive_clean_pages >=
water_mark) {
                        struct page *page = NULL;
                        /* If possible, reclaim a page directly. */
-                       if (direct_reclaim && z->free_pages <
z->pages_min + 8)
+                       /* Riel: the magical "+ 8" please explain */
+                       if (direct_reclaim && z->free_pages < water_mark
+ 8)
                                page = reclaim_page(z);
                        /* If that fails, fall back to rmqueue. */
                        if (!page)

--
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