Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 07 Sep 2001 11:35:28 +0100 | From | Alex Bligh - linux-kernel <> | Subject | Re: page pre-swapping + moving it on cache-list |
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Helge,
> somehow I don't think garbage collection runs will be that fun > in a trashing situation.
Quite possibly
> Don't these algorithms look all over > your stack & heap for pointers? That will surely cause lots > of io as all the apps memory is paged in so the gc algorithm > may look at it.
No - it would look through things like the free area table, the buddy bitmaps, the page table & lists etc., all of which are, of course, in kernel memory. So while it may do unfortunate things to the cache, it doesn't need to touch application memory in order to determine which pages to twiddle with. Of course twiddling the pages themselves requires access to them, but if they are out on disk already they consume (or, if on InactiveClean, could consume) no physical memory so are the least of our problems w.r.t. memory defragmentation.
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