On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>
> >On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> >
> >>Waiting on dirty buffers to sync.
> >
> >Could you elaborate? I never added any additional wait_on_buffer()
> >anywhere in 2.2.x. I see potential problem with ll_rw_block(WRITE)
> >(backported from 2.4.x) and I provided a patch to back it out a few days
> >ago but that wasn't waiting dirty buffers to sync either (it was only
> >waiting to get a I/O request slot if they was all full).
Yes. But my patch (backported from 2.4.x too) which is included into
2.2.17pre9 waits on dirty buffers.
> ah, and btw all the above stuff wasn't stability-related at all.
IMO it is stability related.
Think about a very dirty VM (e.g. mmap002). If you are into a
very-low-memory situation and you dont sync dirty buffers, propably
someone will get killed if the memory gets too low.
Now if you wait for some of those buffers to get synced, making them
freeable, you may avoid killing a process.
I agree with you that in the first place we should not allow the VM to get
completly dirty as in current kernels.
But since we can't fix that in 2.2 "correctly" anyway, we should at least,
under a low-memory situation, avoid killing processes because of a very
dirty VM.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jul 07 2000 - 21:00:09 EST