From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from neon.transmeta.com (neon-best.transmeta.com [206.184.214.10]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA24350 for ; Mon, 21 Dec 1998 12:59:44 -0500 Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 09:58:10 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: New patch (was Re: [PATCH] swapin readahead v3 + kswapd fixes) In-Reply-To: <199812211637.QAA02759@dax.scot.redhat.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: "Stephen C. Tweedie" Cc: Andrea Arcangeli , Rik van Riel , Linux MM , Alan Cox List-ID: On Mon, 21 Dec 1998, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote: > > pre2 works OK on low memory for me but its performance on 64MB sucks > here. pre3 works fine on 64MB but its performance on 8MB sucks even > more. I'm testing it now - the problem is probably just due to my mixing up the pre-2 and pre-3 patches, and pre-3 got the "timid" memory freeing parameters even though the whole point of the pre-3 approach is that it isn't needed any more. > You simply CANNOT tell from looking at the code that it "will > work well for everybody out there on every hardware". Agreed. However, I very much believe that tweaking comes _after_ the basic arhictecture is right. Before the basic architecture is correct, any tweaking is useful only to (a) try to make do with a bad setup and (b) give hints as to what makes a difference, and what the basic architecture _should_ be. As such, your "current != kswapd" tweak gave a whopping good hint about what the architecture _should_ be. And we'll be zeroing in on something that has both the performance and the architecture right. Linus -- This is a majordomo managed list. To unsubscribe, send a message with the body 'unsubscribe linux-mm me@address' to: majordomo@kvack.org