Re: 2.4.8preX VM problems

Pavel Machek
2001-08-14T11:53:21Z

Hi!

> > I have come to the opinion that kswapd needs to be a little smarter
> > -- if it doesn't find anything to swap shouldn't it go to sleep a
> > little longer before trying again? That way it could gracefully
> > degrade itself when it's not making any progress.
> >
> > In my testing (on a dual 1Ghz/2G machine) the machine "locks up" for
> > long periods of time while kswapd runs around trying to do it's
> > thing. If I could disable kswapd I would just to test this.
>
> Your wish is my command. This patch provides a crude-but-effective
> method of disabling kswapd, using:
>
> echo 1 >/proc/sys/kernel/disable_kswapd
>
> I tested this with dbench and found it runs about half as fast, but
> runs. This is reassuring because kswapd is supposed to be doing
> something useful.

Why not just killall -STOP kswapd?

What is expected state of system without kswapd, BTW? Without kflushd,
I give up guaranteed time to get data safely to disk [and its usefull
for spindown]. What happens without kswapd?
Pavel
--
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details at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/velo/index.html.