Re: swap killer kernels

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
30 Mar 1998 17:56:38 GMT

In article <19980330170741.14797@dungeon.inka.de>,
Andreas Jellinghaus <aj@dungeon.inka.de> wrote:
>same problem here :
>i have 64 mb, currently no swap partition (used by a dos based game :-).
>i never got real problems before with 64mb, but starting with 2.1.91
>compiling (and X, some xterms, several daemons like exim or inn, all
>this usual stuff) can kill the system : hard disk is accessed like mad
>(don't know what the kernel does), and X gets nearly freezed
>(to slow to do anything - Zap keystroke didn't help for minutes, so i
> had to use reset).

The 2.1.x kernels almost require a swap area. They should work without
one, but as you see they can get rather upset if they don't find one.

Essentially, not having a swap area means that the kernel cannot get rid
of the pages it would like to get rid of, so it has to spend more CPU
time finding pages that it _doesn't_ like getting rid of in the first
place, and those kinds of pages are obviously more important..

Note that this really isn't anything new as of 2.1.x - it's fairly true
in 2.0.x too. It just becomes more obvious when the pager is more
aggressive.

Linus

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