Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 13:19:51 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 13:19:33 -0500 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:9822 "EHLO flinx.biederman.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 30 Oct 2001 13:19:24 -0500 To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Andrea Arcangeli , Hugh Dickins , Frank Dekervel , Marcelo Tosatti , Subject: Re: need help interpreting 'free' output. In-Reply-To: From: ebiederman@uswest.net (Eric W. Biederman) Date: 30 Oct 2001 11:05:29 -0700 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Lines: 27 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.5 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Linus Torvalds writes: > HOWEVER, _then_ I started wondering about whether the thing needs to be > removed from the swap cache at all, and came to the conclusion that for > the only case we really care about (and the only case where we _can_ > re-use the swap cache page), we don't actually need to remove it from the > cache in the first place. There is a second case, though you may be handling it differently now. Typically the case is swap < RAM. But basically when we don't have enough have enough swap pages it pays to drop pages from the swap cache. So in as many places as we can figuring out how to drop swap pages when the swap space is practically full is important. The other alternative implementation is to create a logical backing store for anonymous pages (so the don't need a presence in the page table) and then we could just walk that backing store and free up swap space on demand. Though if you can put anonymous pages in the page cache now, a variation on that idea may be possible. We don't want to remove the swap from pages that aren't in ram. > Does anybody see why we have to remove it from the swap cache at all? Not just for cow. Eric - 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/