Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 11:01:57 -0800 (PST)
From: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
To: Vaidyanathan Srinivasan <svaidy@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
cc: Aubrey Li <aubreylee@gmail.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       linux-mm@kvack.org, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>,
       "linux-os (Dick Johnson)" <linux-os@analogic.com>,
       Robin Getz <rgetz@blackfin.uclinux.org>
Subject: Re: [RPC][PATCH 2.6.20-rc5] limit total vfs page cache
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On Sat, 20 Jan 2007, Vaidyanathan Srinivasan wrote:

> >> However when the zone reclaimer starts to reclaim pages, it will
> >> remove all cold pages and not specifically pagecache pages.  This
> >> may affect performance of applications.

The reclaimer is passed a control structure that can be used to disable
write to swap (if that is the concern).

> I am open to suggestions on reclaim logic.  My view is that we need
> to selectively reclaim pagecache pages and not just call the
> traditional reclaimer to freeup arbitrary type of pages.

The traditional reclaim works fine if told what to do. Introducing another 
LRU list to do reclaim is a significant change to the VM, creates lots of
overhead etc.
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