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SubjectRe: [PATCH] __free_pages_ok oops
On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> I feel that presence on the lru list should contribute to
> page->count. It seems a bit weird and kludgy that this
> is not so.

You're right, and that's the way page->buffers is treated.
But I've been growing rather tired of !!page->buffers all
over the place, and was wondering in the reverse direction,
whether we need to include page->buffers in page->count.

I'm now inclined to argue that holds which are obvious from
the page structure itself need not be included in the count:
whatever makes the totality of code simplest i.e. minimize
the number of special tests: no point in taking !!page->buffers
out of assorted places if even more places or hotpaths then
need additionally to check for page->buffers.

> If we were to do this then would this not fix networking's
> problem? The skb free wouldn't release the page - it would
> be left on the LRU with ->count == 1 and kswapd would reap it.

Leaving kswapd to reap it is an excellent idea.

> (Says me, hoping that Hugh will code it :))

Thanks for the vote of confidence. But adding PageLRU into
page->count is not work I could confidently thrust upon Marcelo
at this stage of 2.4.18, too many tricky tests to update (and he
has more sense than to take it). However, I think we can do it
more simply and safely than that.

shrink_cache already allows for the case of !page_count(page).
I think we should revert to the way Linus and 2.4.17 had it,
page_cache_release doing the lru_cache_del for the common case,
and remove Ben's lru_cache_del from __free_pages_ok; but if
PageLRU is found there, it's not a BUG(), just a page that
can't be reclaimable until shrink_cache gets to delru it.

This I'll try coding up and testing today. Don't worry, despite
comments above, I won't be changing how page->buffers is counted!

Hugh

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