Re: linux-next: build failure after merge of the akpm-current tree

Josh Triplett
2015-07-27T22:10:47Z

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 01:31:33PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 13:27:58 -0700 josh@joshtriplett.org wrote:
>
> > I agree with that. I'm wondering if, rather than making the
> > SRCU-ification optional, shrinkers themselves could just be optional.
> > Unless I'm badly misunderstanding what shrinkers do, they seem like a
> > perfect example of something that could be omitted with little to no
> > impact. (Stub them out, make them never called, and if you run out of
> > memory just be unhappy. Ditto for the oom-killer, which really ought to
> > be optional.)
>
> The shrinkers do important stuff ;) "find /" will consume large amounts
> of memory for inode and dentry caches. The shrinkers are how we free
> that up again.

*Ah*, I see. I misunderstood their purpose, and I didn't realize that
was one of the cases they covered. While that might be possible to
reduce, it doesn't sound like it can go away entirely. :)

- Josh Triplett