Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 9 Oct 2000 14:59:05 -0300 (BRST) | From | Rik van Riel <> | Subject | Re: VM in v2.4.0test9 |
| |
On Sun, 8 Oct 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Rik van Riel wrote: > > > > The potential for this bug has been around since 2.3.51, when > > different balance_ratios for different zones became possible.
> You must NOT depend on some global "freepages" thing.
> Don't do this patch. Fix it for real instead. You can use the > global amount of free memory for heuristics, but you MUST NOT > use it for deciding to not page stuff out etc - because you will > _always_ end up with cases where you decide that you globally > have enough memory even though locally there is a memory > shortage (or the other way around - you end up thinking that > there is a global memory shortage even if all local memories are > plenty fine, so you end up trying to swap stuff out when it > shouldn't be done).
Please read mm/vmscan.c::free_shortage()
The code honours /both/ global and local shortages.
(but indeed, we shouldn't - and in retrospect don't - depend on global values and can make /proc/sys/vm/freepages writable again so the sysadmin can give a balancing hint on how many free pages to keep around ... which may be important for folks doing gigabit routing)
regards,
Rik -- "What you're running that piece of shit Gnome?!?!" -- Miguel de Icaza, UKUUG 2000
http://www.conectiva.com/ http://www.surriel.com/
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |