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From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date:   Tue, 11 Feb 2020 16:28:39 -0800
Message-ID: <CAHk-=wiGbz3oRvAVFtN-whW-d2F-STKsP1MZT4m_VeycAr1_VQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] vfs: keep inodes with page cache off the inode shrinker LRU
To:     Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>,
        Yafang Shao <laoar.shao@gmail.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>, Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>,
        Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>, kernel-team@fb.com
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On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 3:44 PM Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> Testing this will be a challenge, but the issue was real - a 7GB
> highmem machine isn't crazy and I expect the inode has become larger
> since those days.

Hmm. I would say that in the intening years a 7GB highmem machine has
indeed become crazy.

It used to be something we kind of supported.

But we really should consider HIGHMEM to be something that is on the
deprecation list. In this day and age, there is no excuse for running
a 32-bit kernel with lots of physical memory.

And if you really want to do that, and have some legacy hardware with
a legacy use case, maybe you should be using a legacy kernel.

I'd personally be perfectly happy to start removing HIGHMEM support again.

                   Linus