Re: 2.6.8.1-ck4

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

Con Kolivas wrote:

> Patchset update. These are patches designed to improve system 
> responsiveness with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable 
> to any workload.
>
> The short time between ck3 and ck4 is for two reasons. First Ingo 
> discovered a nasty bug affecting X performance and I believe I made a 
> reasonable breakthrough on the never ending desktop vm swappiness saga.
>
> Web site with faq:
> http://kernel.kolivas.org
> Patches (with split-out also):
> http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/2.6/2.6.8.1/2.6.8.1-ck4/
>
>
> Added since 2.6.8.1-ck3:
> +mapped_watermark.diff
>
> This readjusts the way memory is evicted by lightly 

can you specify lightly with another sentence or two of detail?  Thanks,

Hans

> removing cached ram once the ram is more than 2/3 full, if less than 
> the "mapped watermark" percent of ram is mapped ram (ie applications). 
> The normal system is to aggresively start scanning ram once it is 
> completely full. The benefits of this are:
> 1. Allocating memory while ram is being lightly scanned is faster and 
> cheaper than when it is being heavily scanned.
> 2. There is usually some free ram which tends to speed up application 
> startup times.
> 3. Swapping is an unusual event instead of a common one if you have 
> enough ram for your workload.
> 4. It is rare for your applications to be swapped out by file cache 
> pressure.
> Disadvantage: Less file cache - but can be offset with the tunable
>
> The mapped watermark is configurable so a server for example might be 
> happy to have a lower mapped percentage. The default is 66 and a 
> server might like 33 (0 is also fine)
>
> echo 33 > /proc/sys/vm/mapped
>
> This patch removes the swappiness knob entirely and deprecates all my 
> previous vm hacks (autoregulated swappiness, hard swappiness, kiflush).
>
> +ioport-latency-fix-2.6.8.1.patch
> A nasty bug Ingo tracked down that caused high latencies and cache 
> trashing with X.
>
>
> Changed:
> ~Staircase8.0
> Backed out a tweak designed to improve behaviour under filesystem load 
> - I am avoiding all "tweaks" in the design, and it's effectiveness was 
> questionable.
> Added a tiny check to recalc_task_prio which should make it safe when 
> the Hz value is set below 500.
>
> ~1g_lowmem_i386
> Made the 1Gb of lowmem configurable if highmem is disabled.
>
>
> Removed:
> -hard_swappiness1.diff
> -kiflush3.diff
> Deprected in favour of mapped_watermark
>
>
> Full patchlist:
> from_2.6.8.1_to_staircase8.0.bz2
> schedrange.diff
> schedbatch2.4.diff
> schediso2.5.diff
> sched-adjust-p4gain
> mapped_watermark.diff
> defaultcfq.diff
> config_hz.diff
> 1g_lowmem_i386.diff
> akpm-latency-fix.patch
> 9000-SuSE-117-writeback-lat.patch
> cddvd-cmdfilter-drop.patch
> cool-spinlocks-i386.diff
> bio_uncopy_user-mem-leak.patch
> bio_uncopy_user2.diff
> ioport-latency-fix-2.6.8.1.patch
> supermount-ng204.diff.bz2
> fbsplash-0.9-r5-2.6.8-rc3.patch.bz2
> make-tree_lock-an-rwlock.patch.bz2
> invalidate_inodes-speedup.patch
> 2.6.8.1-mm2-reiser4.diff.bz2
> 2.6.8.1-ck4-version.diff
>
>
> Cheers,
> Con