Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 27 Sep 1998 20:57:45 +0200 (CEST) | From | Andrea Arcangeli <> | Subject | Re: new swap cache regime |
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On Sun, 27 Sep 1998, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>If the only problem is that we cannot do a "swapoff()" on the device, we >should just make swapoff() know about the swap-cache, and walk the page >list. That's fairly easy to do, and implies zero overhead for the exit() >case.
swapoff() just know about the swap cache.
The good point of this my new patch is that the swap cache pages that I am freeing at exit(2) time can' t be useful anymore. Usually the _cache_ contains data and not _garbage_.
Having garbage in the cache will cause that shrink_mmap() will eventually free an useful cache page instead of doing the right thing -> freeing a cache page that contains garbage.
If you don' t like to change swap_free() (for exit(2) performance) another solution would be to add the shrink_swap_cache() in try_to_free_page (implemented a bit different than it was at first) that will be able to remove _only_the_garbage_ in the swap cache. This way garbage swap cache pages will have a major probabilty to be freed I think.
This is my thought but I can be totally wrong because I don' t know many things in the kernel...
Andrea[s] Arcangeli
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