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 LAA30622 for ; Tue, 22 Dec 1998 11:27:59 -0500 Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 08:26:39 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: New patch (was Re: [PATCH] swapin readahead v3 + kswapd fixes) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Andrea Arcangeli Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" , "Stephen C. Tweedie" , Rik van Riel , Linux MM , Alan Cox List-ID: On Tue, 22 Dec 1998, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > > On 22 Dec 1998, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > > >My suggestion (again) would be to not call shrink_mmap in the swapper > >(unless we are endangering atomic allocations). And to never call > >swap_out in the memory allocator (just wake up kswapd). > > Ah, I just had your _same_ _exactly_ idea yesterday but there' s a good > reason I nor proposed/tried it. The point are Real time tasks. kswapd is > not realtime and a realtime task must be able to swapout a little by > itself in try_to_free_pages() when there's nothing to free on the cache > anymore. There's another one: if you never call shrink_mmap() in the swapper, the swapper at least currently won't ever really know when it should finish. > Linus's pre-4 seems to work well here though... I'm still trying to integrate some of the stuff from Stephen in there: the pre-4 contained some re-writes to shrink_mmap() to make Stephens PG_referenced stuff cleaner, but it didn't yet take it into account for "count", for example. The aim certainly is to have something clean that essentially does what Stephen was trying to do. Linus -- This is a majordomo managed list. To unsubscribe, send a message with the body 'unsubscribe linux-mm me@address' to: majordomo@kvack.org