Re: vm lock contention reduction

Rik van Riel
2002-07-06T00:45:25Z

On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, Rik van Riel wrote:
> >
> > But it is, mmap() and anonymous memory don't trigger writeback.
>
> I don't think we can fix that, without going back to the approach of
> marking any writable memory as read-only and counting it at page-fault
> time.

I don't think we have to fix it, as long as the
shrink_caches/page_launder function is well
balanced and throttling is done intelligently.

> Wasn't it you who did that test-patch originally?

I don't remember who did it, so I suspect it wasn't me.
Could it be Ben ?

> There might be some way to avoid the page fault badness (the large page
> stuff will do this automatically, for example), which might make the
> "let's keep track of dirty mappings explicitly" approach acceptable
> again.

That's another approach, I guess it'll be worth looking
into both (and searching the web for what other people
have done before us with both ;))

regards,

Rik
--
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