From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 13:50:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [RFC][DATA] re "ongoing vm suckage" 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: Rik van Riel Cc: Ben LaHaise , Daniel Phillips , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Rik van Riel wrote: > > Hmmmm, indeed. All lazy movement can do is make it > easier to run into a wall, but it should still be > possible without it ... Yes. One of the things this problem seems to show is that "kswapd" really does too many different things. Some people who wake up kswapd really want kswapd to work at _freeing_ pages. Exactly because things like network traffic, buffer flushing etc may not be able to do everything due to atomicity constraints or fear of deadlocks. At the same time, kswapd _also_ ends up doing background aging, so kswapd basically wakes up itself once a second. And when kswapd wakes up itself it does _not_ want to actively free pages, so it has to have that test for "free_shortage()".. 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-mm.org/