From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andrew Morton Subject: Re: what is the point of nr_pages information for the flusher thread? Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2010 16:55:54 -0700 Message-ID: <20100707165554.8b898a40.akpm@linux-foundation.org> References: <20100707231611.GA24281@infradead.org> <20100707163710.a46173b2.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20100707234316.GA21990@infradead.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: fengguang.wu@intel.com, mel@csn.ul.ie, npiggin@suse.de, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org To: Christoph Hellwig Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20100707234316.GA21990@infradead.org> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org On Wed, 7 Jul 2010 19:43:16 -0400 Christoph Hellwig wrote: > > There's also free_more_memory() and do_try_to_free_pages(). > > Indeed. So we still have some special cases that want a specific > number to be written back globally. It could be that those two callsites can be changed to NotDoThat. I do suggest that you dig through the git record and perhaps the email archives to work out the thinking - that's old code. Perhaps we could change things to write back down to the dirty limits, but that might cause subtle breakage in low-memory situations where dirty memory is uneven between zones, dunno. Writing back the whole world would surely be a safe substitute, but might be inefficient. I doubt if a whole lot of rigourous thinking went into either one... -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org