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

Stephen C. Tweedie
1999-01-10T21:42:20Z

Hi,

On Sat, 9 Jan 1999 19:41:36 +0100 (CET), Andrea Arcangeli
<andrea@e-mind.com> said:

> On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> refuse to touch an inode that is busy is a sure way to allow people to

> What do you mean for busy? What about refusing filemap_write_page() in
> filemap_swapout() only if
> !atomic_count(&vma->vm_file->d_entry->d_inode->i_sem.count)?

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.

--Stephen