Re: [patch] arca-vm-6, killed kswapd [Re: [patch] new-vm improvement , [Re: 2.2.0 Bug summary]]

Linus Torvalds
1999-01-04T21:58:07Z

On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Boom. You just killed the machine with your patch, because maybe the
> > GPF_ATOMIC things are what the machine is doing. Imagine a machine that
> > acts as a router - it might not even be running any normal user processes
> > at _all_, but it had damn well better make sure that memory is always
> > available some way. "kswapd" did that for us, and Rik's happiness counts
> > as nothing in face of basic facts of life like that. Sorry.
>
> Its performance properties are very interesting however. They do seem to suggest
> kswapd should be more of a last resort.

Agreed, I found that interesting too. The solution may just be to make
kswapd run a lot less often rather than removing it - for the
machine-killing out-of-memory situation it doesn't matter if kswapd runs
just a few times a second or something like that.

However, one of the things I found so appealing with the patch was the
fact that it removed a lot of code, and that wouldn't be true for
something that just changed kswapd to run less often. Oh, well.

Linus