Re: MM deadlock [was: Re: arca-vm-8...]

Linus Torvalds
1999-01-10T21:50:23Z

On Sun, 10 Jan 1999, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
>
> The problem with that is what happens if we have a large, active
> write-mapped file with lots of IO activity on it; we become essentially
> unable to swap that file out. That has really nasty VM death
> implications for things like databases.

Indeed. Maybe we really should use kswapd for this, especially now that
kswapd doesn't really do much else..

Btw, pre-6 had a bug in kswapd that is relevant to this discussion - it
used a 0 argument to try_to_free_pages(), even though kswapd very much is
able to do IO. (So in pre-6, waking up kswapd is the wrong thing to try to
do ;)

Linus