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Message-ID: <441FEF8D.7090905@yahoo.com.au>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 23:20:29 +1100
From: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
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To: Stone Wang <pwstone@gmail.com>
CC: akpm@osdl.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH][0/8] (Targeting 2.6.17) Posix memory locking and balanced
 mlock-LRU semantic
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Stone Wang wrote:
> Both one of my friends(who is working on a DBMS oriented from
> PostgreSQL) and i had encountered unexpected OOMs with mlock/mlockall.
> 

I'm not sure this is a great idea. There are more conditions than just
mlock that prevent pages being reclaimed. Running out of swap, for
example, no swap, page temporarily pinned (in other words -- any duration
from fleeting to permanent). I think something _much_ simpler could be
done for a more general approach just to teach the VM to tolerate these
pages a bit better.

Also, supposing we do want this, I think there is a fairly significant
queue of mm stuff you need to line up behind... it is probably asking
too much to target 2.6.17 for such a significant change in any case.

But despite all that I looked though and have a few comments ;)
Kudos for jumping in and getting your hands dirty! It can be tricky code.

> The patch brings Linux with:
> 1. Posix mlock/munlock/mlockall/munlockall.
>    Get mlock/munlock/mlockall/munlockall to Posix definiton: transaction-like,
>    just as described in the manpage(2) of mlock/munlock/mlockall/munlockall.
>    Thus users of mlock system call series will always have an clear map of
>    mlocked areas.

In what way are we not now posix compliant now?

-- 
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.


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