From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from max.fys.ruu.nl (max.fys.ruu.nl [131.211.32.73]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id UAA11448 for ; Tue, 14 Apr 1998 20:02:36 -0400 Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 00:58:58 +0200 (MET DST) From: Rik van Riel Reply-To: H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl Subject: Kswapd future (was: Re: new kmod.c - debuggers and testers needed) In-Reply-To: <199804142127.OAA09136@sun4.apsoft.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Perry Harrington Cc: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Perry Harrington wrote: > > On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Perry Harrington wrote: > > > > > Threads > > > are useful in their appropriate context, and kswapd, and kmod would benefit > > > from them. > > > > Hmm, maybe it would be useful for kswapd and bdflush to fork() > > off threads to do the actual disk I/O, so the main thread won't > > be blocked and paused... This could remove some bottlenecks. > > I was thinking that kswapd could use some of it's spare time to do an LRU > paging scan, consolidate free space, and possibly do remapping of process > memory spaces to make them more efficient (map pages to contiguous chunks > of memory and swap). Unfortunately, kswapd doesn't have such a thing as 'spare time'. It is a kernel daemon that does what's neccessary, but we want to keep it's CPU/IO footprint absolutely minimal since all other applications are more important... Rik. +-------------------------------------------+--------------------------+ | Linux: - LinuxHQ MM-patches page | Scouting webmaster | | - kswapd ask-him & complain-to guy | Vries cubscout leader | | http://www.fys.ruu.nl/~riel/ | | +-------------------------------------------+--------------------------+