Re: Linux 2.4.10-pre11

Marcelo Tosatti
2001-09-18T02:32:49Z

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> >
> > Ok, the big thing here is continued merging, this time with Andrea.
> >
> > I still don't like some of the VM changes, but integrating Andrea's VM
> > changes results in (a) better performance and (b) much cleaner inactive
> > page handling in particular. Besides, for the 2.4.x tree, the big priority
> > is stability, we can re-address my other concerns during 2.5.x.
>
> Andrea,
>
> Could you please make a resume of your VM changes ?
>
> Its hard to keep up with VM changes this way.

Andrea,

I've just read a bit of your new VM code and I have a few comments.

You completly removed the "inactive freeable pages" logic: There is no
more distiction between "freeable inactive" and "free" pages. All VM work
is based on "freepages.high" watermark. I don't like that: it seems to
make page freeing more aggressive over time.

Also, if we have several try_to_free_pages() callers, for different
classzones, I'm right saying that a caller with a "smaller" classzone can
"hide" pages in its "active_local_lru" and/or "inactive_local_lru" (during
shrink_cache) from other processes trying to free pages from those higher
zones ?