From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 19:11:39 -0300 (BRT) From: Marcelo Tosatti Subject: Re: [PATCH] Reclaim orphaned swap pages 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: Richard Jerrell Cc: Szabolcs Szakacsits , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Richard Jerrell wrote: > > > That's not really what I'm getting at. Currently if you run a memory > > > intensive application, quit after it's pages are on an lru, and try to > > > restart, you won't be able to get the memory. This is because pages which > > > are sitting around in the swap cache are not counted as free, and they > > > should be, because they are freeable. > > > > No. Dirty swapcache pages which have pte's referencing them are not > > freeable. > > If you quit the application, it no longer has ptes which are referencing > the page. If, in addition, this page no longer has any ptes referencing > it, then it is wasting space. That is why we free the page (providing > that the swap entry is not shared either). Otherwise, you will run out of > memory because everything is stuck in the swap cache until it gets > laundered, regardless of whether anyone is still referencing the > page. That is not a good thing, which is what the patch fixes. Right. But you should not count _all_ swapcache pages as freeable. -- 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/