From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail203.messagelabs.com (mail203.messagelabs.com [216.82.254.243]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0F9F96B0069 for ; Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:12:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: RE: [GIT PULL] mm: frontswap (for 3.2 window) From: James Bottomley In-Reply-To: <3982e04f-8607-4f0a-b855-2e7f31aaa6f7@default> References: <75efb251-7a5e-4aca-91e2-f85627090363@default> <20111027215243.GA31644@infradead.org> <1319785956.3235.7.camel@lappy> <552d2067-474d-4aef-a9a4-89e5fd8ef84f@default> <20111028163053.GC1319@redhat.com> <3982e04f-8607-4f0a-b855-2e7f31aaa6f7@default> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:12:47 +0400 Message-ID: <1320048767.8283.13.camel@dabdike> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: Dan Magenheimer Cc: John Stoffel , Johannes Weiner , Pekka Enberg , Cyclonus J , Sasha Levin , Christoph Hellwig , David Rientjes , Linus Torvalds , linux-mm@kvack.org, LKML , Andrew Morton , Konrad Wilk , Jeremy Fitzhardinge , Seth Jennings , ngupta@vflare.org, Chris Mason , JBeulich@novell.com, Dave Hansen , Jonathan Corbet On Fri, 2011-10-28 at 13:19 -0700, Dan Magenheimer wrote: > For those who "hack on the VM", I can't imagine why the handful > of lines in the swap subsystem, which is probably the most stable > and barely touched subsystem in Linux or any OS on the planet, > is going to be a burden or much of a cost. Saying things like this doesn't encourage anyone to trust you. The whole of the MM is a complex, highly interacting system. The recent issues we've had with kswapd and the shrinker code gives a nice demonstration of this ... and that was caused by well tested code updates. You can't hand wave away the need for benchmarks and performance tests. You have also answered all questions about inactive cost by saying "the code has zero cost when it's compiled out" This also is a non starter. For the few use cases it has, this code has to be compiled in. I suspect even Oracle isn't going to ship separate frontswap and non-frontswap kernels in its distro. So you have to quantify what the performance impact is when this code is compiled in but not used. Please do so. James -- 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/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: email@kvack.org