Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 8 Nov 2001 09:00:27 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: out_of_memory() heuristic broken for different mem configurations (fwd) |
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On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote: > > I remember Linus had a reasoning for the "scan _ALL_ ptes until success" > behaviour. > > Linus, was that due to zone-specific (eg DMA shortage on bigmem machine) > shortages or ?
No, the major reason simply _is_ because it's fairly easy to come up with test-cases that are mostly MAP_SHARED, and are not out-of-memory. Returning early from swap_out() is simply fundamentally wrong - whether we have free swap-space or not has very little to do with anything.
(Well, whether we have free swap space or not _is_ meaningful once we have scanned all VM's, but not before that).
But see my suggestion about potentially noticing the oom _before_ calling swap_out(). Thanks to anonymous-in-LRU we have a _lot_ of powerful information that we simply traditionally haven't had. It doesn't just tell us when we should start swapping out, it can also tell us if swap-out is going to need swap-space or not. It can even tell how _much_ swap-space we'll need to satisfy the "free N pages from the VM".
> However, the current code breaks badly as I've tested on the 16GB boxen.
I understand. I just think the fix needs to be different.
Linus
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