Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 6 Nov 2002 11:11:28 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 6 Nov 2002 11:11:28 -0500 Received: from perninha.conectiva.com.br ([200.250.58.156]:28041 "EHLO perninha.conectiva.com.br") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Wed, 6 Nov 2002 11:11:23 -0500 Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 11:18:42 -0200 (BRST) From: Marcelo Tosatti X-X-Sender: marcelo@freak.distro.conectiva To: Andrea Arcangeli Cc: James Cleverdon , Andrew Morton , , Rik van Riel Subject: Re: Kswapd madness in 2.4 kernels In-Reply-To: <20021106111149.GC3823@x30.school.suse.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1786 Lines: 38 On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 02:13:00PM -0800, James Cleverdon wrote: > > Status report: > > > > Due to dependencies, I didn't try the two recommended patches alone. I ran > > Andrea's 2.4.20-pre10aa1 kernel on the test load for one week. Low memory > > was conserved and kswapd never went out of control. Presumably, > > 05_vm_16_active_free_zone_bhs-1 did the job for buffers, and the inode patch > > continued to work. > > yes, for stability the related-bh patch is known to be more than enough > and this is a nice confirmation. I would also like to integrated some > bit of andrew's nuke-buffer patch for performance reasons (to maximize > the free memory utilization), not for stability. For stability teaching > the VM about the problem is the right fix IMHO, good to have regardless > in case for some reason the bh cannot be nucked if we can't take a lock > or similar. But the bit that drops the bhs after reads may improve > memory utilization when there is no memory pressure at all. The part I > wouldn't merge in 2.4 from the Andrew's patch is the drop after writes, > that has the potential of slowing down rewrite. I'm not saying it will > slow down the rewrite performance, but there is definitely the > potential. My fix instead has no way to affect read/writes w/o memory > pressure compared to mainline (i.e. in a <1G machine). > > > Are there any plans on getting these into 2.4.21? I will look closely at -aa during 2.4.21-pre stage, yes. Andrea, please bug me on that. - 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/