Re: Kernel Event Notifications (was: [RFC] Parallelize IO for e2fsck)

Jon Masters
2008-01-28T23:28:22Z

On Sat, 2008-01-26 at 16:55 +0300, Al Boldi wrote:
> KOSAKI Motohiro wrote:
> > > > And from a performance point of view letting applications voluntarily
> > > > free some memory is better even than starting to swap.
> > >
> > > Absolutely.
> >
> > the mem_notify patch can realize "just before starting swapping"
> > notification :)

I looked at this a year or two back, then ran out of time. But the thing
I wanted to do was have libc's memory allocation routines extended to
handle these through reservations - the kernel should send a userspace
notification and then there should be some kind of concept of returning
memory that's been used for "opportunistic" userspace caching, e.g. in
firefox to cache the last 10 web pages. Let us know how you get on :)

Jon.