Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263147AbUC2WCS (ORCPT ); Mon, 29 Mar 2004 17:02:18 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263149AbUC2WCS (ORCPT ); Mon, 29 Mar 2004 17:02:18 -0500 Received: from hoemail2.lucent.com ([192.11.226.163]:22406 "EHLO hoemail2.firewall.lucent.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263147AbUC2WCR (ORCPT ); Mon, 29 Mar 2004 17:02:17 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <16488.40157.474575.545711@gargle.gargle.HOWL> Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 17:02:05 -0500 From: "John Stoffel" To: Hugh Dickins Cc: John Stoffel , Andrew Morton , Subject: Re: 2.6.5-rc2-mm1 - swapoff dies with OOM, why? In-Reply-To: References: <16488.14980.884442.349267@gargle.gargle.HOWL> X-Mailer: VM 7.14 under Emacs 20.6.1 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1676 Lines: 37 >>>>> "Hugh" == Hugh Dickins writes: Hugh> On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, John Stoffel wrote: >> >> I'm still wondering why swapoff dies though. Shouldn't it complete, >> or at least have some way *to* complete if needed? I realize, with a >> memory leak in the filesystem, it's a hard thing to deal with. Hugh> If there's not enough freeable memory for what's out on swap, Hugh> swapoff cannot very well complete. Either it can hang while Hugh> other processes get killed by the OOM killer once swapoff has Hugh> filled memory (as 2.4), until there's enough memory free to take Hugh> in what's still needed from swap; or the OOM killer can kill it Hugh> off (as 2.6). I much prefer the 2.6 behaviour - unlike many Hugh> processes, swapoff can safely be restarted. So the admin can Hugh> then choose what else to kill, or add replacement swap, then try Hugh> the original swapoff again. But in this case, there was no way to force the turning off of swap, since the ext3 bug in 2.6.5-rc2-mm1 had filled the cache, and wasn't going away. Is this right? I wonder if there's a way to tell swap to 'go away when you can, don't allow more swap (kill new requests), and generally work on pushing stuff back to memory, or other swap partitions.' This doesn't have to be the default, but it would be nice to have a big hammer to beat on the system at times. Thanks for the feedback Hugh, I do appreciate it. John - 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/