From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 11:15:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [patch] balanced highmem subsystem under pre7-9 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Ingo Molnar Cc: Rik van Riel , Andrea Arcangeli , MM mailing list , linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu List-ID: Ingo, one thing struck me.. Have you actually tested unmodified 99-pre7? You said that you've been running the "standard kernel with the highmem modification" for a few weeks on a 8GB machine, and that makes me wonder if you maybe didn't even try pre7 without your mod? What _used_ to happen with multi-zone setups was that if on ezone started to need balancing, you got a lot of page-out activity in the other zones too, because vmscan would _only_ look at the LRU information, and would happily page stuff out from the zones that weren't affected at all. On a highmem machine this means, for example, that if the regular memory zone (or the DMA zone) got under pressure, we would start paging out highmem pages too as we encountered them in vmscan. With such a setup, your patch makes lots of sense - trying to decouple the highmem zone as much as possible. But the more recent kernels should be better at not touching zones that don't need touching (it will still change the LRU information, though). 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/