Re: swapout selection change in pre1

Linus Torvalds
2001-01-13T08:05:14Z

On Sat, 13 Jan 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
>
> The swapout selection change in pre1 will make the kernel swapout behavior
> not fair anymore to tasks which are sharing the VM (vfork()).
>
> I dont see any clean fix for that problem. Do you?

What?

It's the other way around: it used to be _extremely_ unfair towards
threads, because threads woul dget swapped out _much_ more that
non-threads. The new "count only nr of mm's" actually fixes a real problem
in this area: a process with hundreds of threads would just get swapped
out _way_ too quickly (it used to be counted as "hundreds of VM's", even
though it's obviously just one VM, and should be swapped out as such).

Linus