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

Nick Piggin
2004-07-09T02:06:59Z

William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>
>>>Oh, then I'm stuck in the GFP_WIRED quagmire after all. I guess since
>>>fixing it involves adding lines I'm in deep trouble.
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 10:57:01AM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
>
>>Or just see if you can tighten up the conditions for OOM to
>>start with?
>
>
> You must not have seen the patches. the thread starts with Message-id:
> <0406231407.HbLbJbXaHbKbWa5aJb1a4aKb0a3aKb1a0a2aMbMbYa3aLbMb3aJbWaJbXaMbLb1a342@holomorphy.com>
>
> 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.
>

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.