Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 22 Mar 2000 00:08:29 -0700 (MST) | From | Craig Kulesa <> | Subject | Re: Unfreed kernel buffers (fsck and 2.3.99-pre*) |
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Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Can you try pre2-4 or later? It should have unbroken the breakage,
Indeed; it made the situation bearable again. :) Thanks!
There is _another_ issue, maybe an academic one, that I'd like to ask about. Maybe someone could help illuminate the issue; it regards the releasing of swapped pages.
Summary: If I open a suitably large text file in Emacs, and the system swaps liberally, and the application is closed -- those swapped pages are not immediately released in 2.3.99-pre* (up to pre3-5), but only upon "demand".
Here's an example.
Starting situation, in X-windows, under 2.3.99-pre3-5: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 30348 29776 572 0 284 22344 minus buffers/cache: 7148 23200 Swap: 32764 3008 29756
Now open a large Emacs session, go 23M into swap. Close Emacs. Then look:
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 30348 27136 3212 0 160 22748 minus buffers/cache: 4228 26120 Swap: 32764 17640 15124
Hmmm, there's nothing significant running anymore, yet 17M is shown paged out. If I go and 'dd if=/dev/zero of=dump.dat bs=1024k count=40', or attempt to allocate "relatively large" amounts of memory, _then_ those swapped pages are freed and I get back to where I started:
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 30348 29568 780 0 552 21660 minus buffers/cache: 7356 22992 Swap: 32764 3644 29120
So... is it better to release swapped pages immediately, or only upon "demand"? I would have naively guessed the former, but maybe I'm missing a crucial point.
Thoughts?
Craig Kulesa ckulesa@as.arizona.edu
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