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

Andrew Morton
2004-07-09T04:52:45Z

William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
>
> William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
> >> Enumerate those more basic things.
>
> On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 07:12:54PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > 1: work out why it's prematurely calling out_of_memory() when laptop_mode=1.
>
> The obvious difference in writeback policy.

The writeback code isn't in the picture with this workload - there's no
dirty pagecache around.

> I've apparently touched on policy, and paid for that mistake with an
> overpoweringly Sterculian whiff of penguins. Now backing away slowly...

Not sure what that means.

The problem is trivial to reproduce. Killing these lines in shrink_list():

if (laptop_mode && !sc->may_writepage)
goto keep_locked;

makes it go away. Something's out of whack in there, and the removal of
the free swapspace test exposed some prior problem. I'll poke at it some
more.