From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 12:30:15 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [DATAPOINT] pre7-6 will not swap In-Reply-To: <3915C053.EE77396C@sgi.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan Cc: riel@nl.linux.org, Benjamin Redelings I , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: 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 -- 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/