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Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 17:11:49 -0300 (BRST)
From: Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>
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To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <mikeg@wen-online.de>,
        Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>,
        Daniel Phillips <phillips@bonn-fries.net>,
        Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: VM in 2.4.7-pre hurts...
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On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> In fact, I do not see any part of the whole path that sets the
> page age at all, so we're basically using a completely
> uninitialized field here (it's been initialized way back when
> the page was allocated, but because it hasn't been part of the
> normal aging scheme it has only been aged up, never down, so the
> value is pretty much random by the time we actually add it to
> the swap cache pool).

Not quite. The more a page has been used, the higher the
page->age will be. This means the system has a way to
distinguish between anonymous pages which were used once
and anonymous pages which are used lots of times.


> Suggested fix:

	[snip disabling of page aging for anonymous memory]

> That would certainly help explain why aging doesn't work for some people.

As would your patch ;)

regards,

Rik
--
Executive summary of a recent Microsoft press release:
   "we are concerned about the GNU General Public License (GPL)"


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