Re: 2.5.73-mm2

William Lee Irwin III
2003-07-01T10:51:34Z

On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> It was suggested during my last round of OOM killer fixes that one of
>> my patches, which just checked nr_free_buffer_pages() > 0, should also
>> consider userspace (i.e. reclaimable at will) memory free.

On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 11:46:34AM +0100, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> If you pursued it, wouldn't your patch also need to change
> nr_free_buffer_pages() to do what you think it does, count
> the free lowmem pages? It, and nr_free_pagecache_pages(),
> and nr_free_zone_pages(), are horribly badly named. They
> count present_pages-pages_high, they don't count free pages:
> okay for initialization estimates, useless for anything dynamic.
> Hugh
> p.s. any chance of some more imaginative Subject lines :-?

Well, I was mostly looking for getting handed back 0 when lowmem is
empty; I actually did realize they didn't give entirely accurate counts
of free lowmem pages.