From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from burns.conectiva (burns.conectiva [10.0.0.4]) by perninha.conectiva.com.br (Postfix) with SMTP id 581DC38C12 for ; Tue, 7 Aug 2001 14:11:47 -0300 (EST) Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 14:11:46 -0300 (BRST) From: Rik van Riel 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: Linus Torvalds Cc: Ben LaHaise , Daniel Phillips , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote: > So I _think_ that what happens is: > - alloc_pages() itself isn't making any progress, because it's called > with GFP_NOFS and thus cannot touch a lot of the pages. > - we wake up kswapd to try to help, but kswapd doesn't do anything > because it thinks things are fine. Obvious, you introduced this when you decided to put the following two things into the kernel: 1) lazy queue movement, when an inactive page gets touched we don't move it to the active list immediately 2) Daniel Phillips's use-once optimisations, all new pages start on the inactive_dirty list The combination of these two makes for a hell of a lot of unfreeable pages on the inactive lists and can effectively disable kreclaimd. regards, Rik -- Executive summary of a recent Microsoft press release: "we are concerned about the GNU General Public License (GPL)" http://www.surriel.com/ http://www.conectiva.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com/ -- 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/