RE: la la la la ... swappiness

Linus Torvalds
2006-12-05T04:46:42Z

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Aucoin wrote:
>
> If I'm going to go through all the trouble to change the kernel and maybe
> create a new proc file how much code would I have to touch to create a proc
> file to set something like, let's say, effective memory and have all the vm
> calculations use effective memory as the basis for swap and cache
> calculations?

Considering your /proc/meminfo under load:

MemTotal: 2075152 kB
MemFree: 169848 kB
Buffers: 4360 kB
Cached: 334824 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 178692 kB
Inactive: 271452 kB
HighTotal: 1179392 kB
HighFree: 3040 kB
LowTotal: 895760 kB
LowFree: 499876 kB
SwapTotal: 524276 kB
SwapFree: 524276 kB
Dirty: 0 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 116720 kB
Slab: 27956 kB
..

I actually suspect you should be _fairly_ close to such a situation
already. In particular, the Active and Inactive lists really are fairly
small, and don't contain the big SHM area, they seem to be just the cache
and some (a fairly small amount of) anonymous pages.

The above actually confuses me mightily. I _really_ expected the SHM pages
to show up on the active/inactive lists if it was actually SHM, and they
don't seem to. What am I missing?

Louis, exactly how do you allocate that big 1.6GB shared area?

Linus