Re: missing madvise functionality

Rik van Riel
2007-04-03T21:00:09Z

Andrew Morton wrote:

> Oh. I was assuming that we'd want to unmap these pages from pagetables and
> mark then super-easily-reclaimable. So a later touch would incur a minor
> fault.
>
> But you think that we should leave them mapped into pagetables so no such
> fault occurs.

> Leaving the pages mapped into pagetables means that they are considerably
> less likely to be reclaimed.

If we move the pages to a place where they are very likely to be
reclaimed quickly (end of the inactive list, or a separate
reclaim list) and clear the dirty and referenced lists, we can
both reclaim the page easily *and* avoid the page fault penalty.

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