Re: swap prefetching merge plans

Jesper Juhl
2006-03-23T11:19:39Z

On 3/23/06, Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 03:53 pm, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > A look at the -mm lineup for 2.6.17:
>
> > mm-implement-swap-prefetching.patch
> > mm-implement-swap-prefetching-fix.patch
> > mm-implement-swap-prefetching-tweaks.patch
>
> > Still don't have a compelling argument for this, IMO.
>
> For those users who feel they do have a compelling argument for it, please
> speak now or I'll end up maintaining this in -ck only forever. I've come to
> depend on it with my workloads now so I'm never dropping it. There's no point
> me explaining how it is useful yet again, though, because I just end up
> looking like I'm handwaving. It seems a shame for it not to be available to
> all linux users.
>

I certainly like it and see a bennefit.
My situation is like this:
A KDE desktop with OpenOffice, Lyx, Firefox, Eclipse, Gimp & a bunch
of xterms running more or less permanently.
When I work on kernel stuff I often end up running "make clean ; make
allyesconfig ; make" and the build and especially final link of the
kernel usually kills the box for a while, so I tend to walk away and
come back a while later when it's done.
Where I see the bennefit of swap prefetch is when I come back to my
box after such a build and pull one of my other running apps back to
the foreground. The apps come back noticably faster when I'm running a
swap prefetching kernel - we are not talking massive amounts of time,
just a few seconds, but it's enough for me to notice when I sometimes
happen to run a mainline kernel without swap prefetch.

--
Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
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