Re: VM in 2.4.7-pre hurts...

Christoph Rohland
2001-07-09T08:27:50Z

Hi Mike,

On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> I don't know exactly what is happening, but I do know _who_ is
> causing the problem I'm seeing.. it's tmpfs. When mounted on /tmp
> and running X/KDE, the tar [1] will oom my box every time because
> page_launder trys and always failing to get anything scrubbed after
> the tar has run for a while. Unmount tmpfs/restart X and do the
> same tar, and all is well.
>
> (it's not locked pages aparantly. I modified page_launder to move
> those to the active list, and refill_inactive_scan to rotate them to
> the end of the active list. inactive_dirty list still grows ever
> larger, filling with 'stuff' that page_launder can't clean until
> you're totally oom)

Do you have set the size parameter for tmpfs? Else it will grow until
oom.

Another point I see with tmpfs is the following: tmpfs writepage
simply moves the page to the swap cache. But it does not schedule a
writeout of the page. So we have to scan the swap cache to really free
memory.

Greetings
Christoph