Re: The long, long life of an inactive_dirty page

Andrew Crawford
2004-05-12T15:28:41Z

Arjan van de Ven wrote:

>bdflush and co WILL commit the data to disk after like 30 seconds.
>They will not move it to inactive_clean; that will happen at the first
>sight of memory pressure. The code that does that notices that the data
>isn't dirty and won't do a write-out just a move.

Thanks for that. I have a couple of follow-up questions if I may be so bold:

1. Is there any way, from user space, to distinguish inactive_dirty pages
which have actually been written from those which haven't?

2. Is there any reason, conceptually, that bdflush shouldn't move the pages to
the inactive_clean list as page_launder does? After all, they become "known
clean" at that point, not X hours later when there is a memory shortfall.

Cheers,