Re: 2.4.8preX VM problems

[Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>]

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.