From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from neon.transmeta.com (neon-best.transmeta.com [206.184.214.10]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA09079 for ; Mon, 4 Jan 1999 16:58:07 -0500 Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1999 13:55:43 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: [patch] arca-vm-6, killed kswapd [Re: [patch] new-vm improvement , [Re: 2.2.0 Bug summary]] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Alan Cox Cc: andrea@e-mind.com, steve@netplus.net, bredelin@ucsd.edu, sct@redhat.com, linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu, H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, Alan Cox wrote: > > Boom. You just killed the machine with your patch, because maybe the > > GPF_ATOMIC things are what the machine is doing. Imagine a machine that > > acts as a router - it might not even be running any normal user processes > > at _all_, but it had damn well better make sure that memory is always > > available some way. "kswapd" did that for us, and Rik's happiness counts > > as nothing in face of basic facts of life like that. Sorry. > > Its performance properties are very interesting however. They do seem to suggest > kswapd should be more of a last resort. Agreed, I found that interesting too. The solution may just be to make kswapd run a lot less often rather than removing it - for the machine-killing out-of-memory situation it doesn't matter if kswapd runs just a few times a second or something like that. However, one of the things I found so appealing with the patch was the fact that it removed a lot of code, and that wouldn't be true for something that just changed kswapd to run less often. Oh, well. Linus -- This is a majordomo managed list. To unsubscribe, send a message with the body 'unsubscribe linux-mm me@address' to: majordomo@kvack.org