Re: [PATCH] mm: MADV_WILLNEED implementation for anonymous memory

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:53:26 +0100 Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:

> 
> On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 01:47 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:35:18 +0100 Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 01:12 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Implementation-wise: make_pages_present() _can_ be converted to do this. 
> > > > But it's a lot of patching, and the result will be a cleaner, faster and
> > > > smaller core MM.  Whereas your approach is easy, but adds more code and
> > > > leaves the old stuff slow-and-dirty.
> > > > 
> > > > Guess which approach is preferred? ;)
> > > 
> > > Ok, I'll look at using make_pages_present().
> > 
> > Am still curious to know what inspired this change.  What are the use
> > cases?  Performance testing results, etc?
> 
> Ah, that is Lennarts Pulse Audio thing, he has samples in memory which
> might not have been used for a while, and he wants to be able to
> pre-fetch those when he suspects they might need to be played. So that
> once the audio thread comes along and stuffs them down /dev/dsp its all
> nice in memory.
> 
> Since its all soft real-time at best he feels its better to do a best
> effort at not hitting swap than it is to strain the system with mlock
> usage.

hrm.  Does he know about pthread_create()?

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