Re: [DATAPOINT] pre7-6 will not swap

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>]

On Sun, 7 May 2000, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan wrote:
> 
> In the presense unreferenced pages in zones with free_pages > pages_high,
> should shrink_mmap ever fail? Current shrink_mmap will
> always skip over the pages of such zones. This in turn
> can lead to swapping.

I think shrink_mmap() should fail for that case: it tells the logic that
calls it that its time to stop calling shrink_mmap(), and go to vmscan
instead (so that next time we call shrink_mmap, we may in fact find some
pages to free).

If there really are tons of pages with free_pages > pages_high, then we
must have called shrink_mmap() for some other reason, so we're probably
interested in another zone altogether that isn't even a subset of the
"tons of memory" case (because if we had been interested in any class that
has the "lots of free memory" zone as a subset, then the logic in
__alloc_pages() would just have allocated it directly without worrying
about zone balancing at all).

		Linus

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