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Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2001 20:44:56 -0500
From: Jeremy Jackson <jerj@coplanar.net>
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To: Manfred Spraul <manfred@colorfullife.com>
CC: Neelam Saboo <neelam_saboo@usa.net>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [Re: paging behavior in Linux]
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Manfred Spraul wrote:

> Neelam Saboo wrote:
> >
> > hi,
> >
> > After I installed a newer version of Kernel (2.4.2) and enable DMA option in

Ah hah!  There's a huge difference in performance (in my experience) with
DMA.  also, using hdparm utility, *most* drives work fine with dma,
irq unmasking, multisector transfers, and 32bit access.
hdparm -i /dev/hda or such will tell you maximum multisector supported.
the only reason these aren't enabled AFAIK is that SOME drives don't,
and when there's a problem it could cause data loss.

The worker thread may just have been overtaking the prefetcher
because dma was off and disk was slow.

>
> > hardware configuration, the behavior changes.
> > I can see performance improvements when another thread is used. Also, i can
> > see timing overlaps between two threads. i.e. when one thread is blocked on a
> > page fault, other thread keeps working.
> > Now, how can this behavior be explained , given the earlier argument.
> > Is it that, a newer version of kernel has fixed the problem of the semaphore
> > ?
> >
> No, that change won't happen until 2.5
>
> I can only guess:
> the other thread keeps working until it causes a page fault - with both
> 2.4.1 and 2.4.2.
>
> I haven't followed the threads about the mm changes closely, but I
> assume that the swapout behaviour changed, and that your worker thread
> now runs without causing page faults.

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