Re: [PATCH][1/2] adjust dirty threshold for lowmem-only mappings

Andrea Arcangeli
2004-12-25T02:07:52Z

On Fri, Dec 24, 2004 at 05:12:32PM -0500, Rik van Riel wrote:
> The process 'dd', and all the other processes, live in
> the highmem zone, which has 2.5GB of memory free. Now
> tell me again why you think the swap token has any
> relevance to those 950MB of pagecache that is filling
> up lowmem ?

If 2.5G of ram is really free, then how can the oom killer be invoked in
the first place? If that happens it means you're under a lowmem
shortage, something you apparently ruled out when you said
lowmem_reserve couldn't help your workload.

If you would post a vmstat before and after the oom killing plus the
exact oom killer syslog dump, it would help to see what's going on.

I sure can't reproduce your problem here with 2.6.10-rc3 + the 4 patches
I posted (so with swap-token disabled).