From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261315AbVF1Mus (ORCPT ); Tue, 28 Jun 2005 08:50:48 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261437AbVF1Mur (ORCPT ); Tue, 28 Jun 2005 08:50:47 -0400 Received: from 41-052.adsl.zetnet.co.uk ([194.247.41.52]:14860 "EHLO mail.esperi.org.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261315AbVF1Mug (ORCPT ); Tue, 28 Jun 2005 08:50:36 -0400 To: "Al Boldi" Cc: "'Marcelo Tosatti'" , Subject: Re: Kswapd flaw References: <200506281147.OAA20216@raad.intranet> From: Nix X-Emacs: featuring the world's first municipal garbage collector! Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:50:18 +0100 In-Reply-To: <200506281147.OAA20216@raad.intranet> (Al Boldi's message of "28 Jun 2005 12:49:42 +0100") Message-ID: <87irzy63xx.fsf@amaterasu.srvr.nix> User-Agent: Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) XEmacs/21.4 (Corporate Culture, linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 28 Jun 2005, Al Boldi yowled: > Nix wrote: >> On 28 Jun 2005, Al Boldi murmured woefully: >>> Kswapd starts evicting processes to fullfil a malloc, when it should >>> just deny it because there is no swap. >> I can't even tell what you're expecting. Surely not that no pages are ever >> evicted or flushed; your memory would fill up with page cache in no time. > > Please do flush anytime, and do it in sync during OOMs; but don't evict > procs especially not RUNNING procs, that is overkill. But processes (really, mapped text pages; really, read-only mapped pages of all kinds) are loaded piecemeal in any case. Would you really like a system where once something was faulted in, it could never leave? You'd run out of memory *awfully* fast. A system in which pages can be faulted in *and* out is consistent: one in which they can only be faulted in is both inconsistent and very deadlock-prone. -- `I lost interest in "blade servers" when I found they didn't throw knives at people who weren't supposed to be in your machine room.' --- Anthony de Boer