From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 16:45:16 -0500 (EST) From: Rik van Riel Subject: Re: [patch] vmsig: notify user applications of virtual memory events via real-time signals In-Reply-To: <000001c5efa6$ff513990$9728010a@redmond.corp.microsoft.com> Message-ID: References: <000001c5efa6$ff513990$9728010a@redmond.corp.microsoft.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Yi Feng Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, 'Andrew Morton' , 'Emery Berger' , 'Matthew Hertz' List-ID: On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Yi Feng wrote: > The user application can therefore maintain the residence information of > all its pages and cooperate with the kernel under memory pressure. That seems pretty high overhead. I wonder if it wouldn't work similarly well for the kernel to simply notify the registrered apps that memory is running low and they should garbage collect _something_, without caring which pages. Then the apps can "shoot holes" in their memory use by calling madvise with MADV_DONTNEED on the pages the application judges to be the least likely ones to be used again. OTOH, maybe keeping state for each page is low enough overhead. I will have to read your patch to figure out the details ;) -- All Rights Reversed -- 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/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org