Re: 2.6.5-rc2-mm1 - swapoff dies with OOM, why?

[Hugh Dickins]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, John Stoffel wrote:
> 
> But in this case, there was no way to force the turning off of swap,
> since the ext3 bug in 2.6.5-rc2-mm1 had filled the cache, and wasn't
> going away.  Is this right?  

Well, it was a memory leak, filling more and more resident memory,
leaving less and less for other uses.  I didn't investigate, but
I'm guessing not cache.

> I wonder if there's a way to tell swap to 'go away when you can, don't
> allow more swap (kill new requests), and generally work on pushing
> stuff back to memory, or other swap partitions.'

User space thing really: you could add an option to swapoff(8) to loop
retrying (well, I think it would need to fork off a child to do the
sys_swapoff, fork another when that one gets OOM-killed; a bit messy,
I agree).

Hugh

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