Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 4 Jan 1999 13:55:43 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [patch] arca-vm-6, killed kswapd [Re: [patch] new-vm improvement , [Re: 2.2.0 Bug summary]] |
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On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, Alan Cox wrote: > > Boom. You just killed the machine with your patch, because maybe the > > GPF_ATOMIC things are what the machine is doing. Imagine a machine that > > acts as a router - it might not even be running any normal user processes > > at _all_, but it had damn well better make sure that memory is always > > available some way. "kswapd" did that for us, and Rik's happiness counts > > as nothing in face of basic facts of life like that. Sorry. > > Its performance properties are very interesting however. They do seem to suggest > kswapd should be more of a last resort.
Agreed, I found that interesting too. The solution may just be to make kswapd run a lot less often rather than removing it - for the machine-killing out-of-memory situation it doesn't matter if kswapd runs just a few times a second or something like that.
However, one of the things I found so appealing with the patch was the fact that it removed a lot of code, and that wouldn't be true for something that just changed kswapd to run less often. Oh, well.
Linus
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