Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] [Request for inclusion] Filesystem in Userspace | From | Bryan Henderson <> | Date | Thu, 18 Nov 2004 09:00:36 -0800 |
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> 2) doing non-blocking asynchronous writepage > >In the second case there is no deadlock, because the memory subsystem >doesn't wait for data to be written. If the filesystem refuses to >write back data in a timely manner, memory will get full and OOM >killer will go to work.
I don't see how the OOM killer can help you here. The OOM killer deals with the system being out of virtual memory; writepage is about freeing real memory. The real memory allocator will wait forever if it has to for pageouts to complete so that it can evict a page and free up real memory.
If a pageout requires a user space process to run, and the user space process requires additional real memory (e.g. in order to swap something in from swap space) to do the pageout, you can have a deadlock.
-- Bryan Henderson IBM Almaden Research Center San Jose CA Filesystems - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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