Re: Can't make use of swap memory in 2.6.7-bk19

William Lee Irwin III
2004-07-09T02:09:15Z

William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> They added a flag indicating wiredness or no to the gfp_mask, which was
>> then propagated down the call chain and eventually passed as an argument
>> to out_of_memory(). In turn, out_of_memory() used the flag to determine
>> whether the nr_swap_pages > 0 check was relevant. i.e. they refined the
>> OOM conditions based on the wiredness of the failing allocation. What
>> probably got the stuff permavetoed was the stats reporting I did along
>> with it that would have been trivial to drop while retaining the needed
>> functional change. The patch was motivated by the nr_swap_pages > 0
>> check deadlocking. The __GFP_WIRED business was done to discriminate
>> the obvious deadlocking scenario from the false OOM mentioned here.

On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 12:06:54PM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> No, I did see those patches. I'm not saying they're not worth
> persuing; on the contrary, they look quite interesting. However,
> it might worthwhile looking at more basic things first, for this
> problem anyway.

Enumerate those more basic things.

-- wli