From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2000 13:31:28 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [patch] first bit of vm balancing fixes for 2.3.52-1 In-Reply-To: <200003202058.MAA47885@google.engr.sgi.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Kanoj Sarcar Cc: "Stephen C. Tweedie" , Ben LaHaise , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Mon, 20 Mar 2000, Kanoj Sarcar wrote: > > > > The current behaviour is highly suboptimal: if you have two zones to > > pick from for a given alloc_page(), and the first zone is at its > > pages_min threshold, then we will always allocate from that first zone > > and push it into kswap activation no matter how much free space there is > > in the next zone. > > With Linus' change to the page alloc code in pre2, yes, spreading > the allocation is an option, but I would be real careful before > putting that in 2.4. It's not an option: it is how things work. My code expliticly says: ok, walk the list of zones, if any of them have plenty of memory free just allocate it. Only if none of the zones is an obvious target for allocation do we balance, and then we mark all the appropriate zones for balancing at once. Linus -- 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.eu.org/Linux-MM/