Re: [with-PATCH-really] highmem deadlock removal, balancing & cleanup

Rik van Riel
2001-05-25T22:36:22Z

On Fri, 25 May 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, 25 May 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> >
> > OK, shoot me. Here it is again, this time _with_ patch...
>
> I'm not going to apply this as long as it plays experimental
> games with "shrink_icache()" and friends. I haven't seen anybody
> comment on the performance on this, and I can well imagine that
> it would potentially shrink the dcache too aggressively when
> there are lots of inactive-dirty pages around, where
> page_launder is the right thing to do, and shrinking
> icache/dcache might not be.

Your analysis exactly describes what happens in your current
code, though I have to admit that my patch doesn't change it.

Without the patch my workstation (with ~180MB RAM) usually has
between 50 and 80MB of inode/dentry cache and real usable stuff
gets swapped out.

Either you can go make Linux 2.4 usable again for normal people,
or you can go buy us all a gig of ram.

regards,

Rik
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