Re: 2.5.73-mm2

Hugh Dickins
2003-07-01T10:46:34Z

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.

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 :-?