Re: [ANNOUNCE] Minneapolis Cluster Summit, July 29-30

Andrew Morton
2004-07-12T20:52:34Z

Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> I don't see why it would be a problem to implement a "this task
> facilitates page reclaim" flag for userspace tasks that would take
> care of this as well as the kernel does.

Yes, that has been done before, and it works - userspace "block drivers"
which permanently mark themselves as PF_MEMALLOC to avoid the obvious
deadlocks.

Note that you can achieve a similar thing in current 2.6 by acquiring
realtime scheduling policy, but that's an artifact of some brainwave which
a VM hacker happened to have and isn't a thing which should be relied upon.

A privileged syscall which allows a task to mark itself as one which
cleans memory would make sense.