> The reason is that the Linux 2.4 kernel no longer reclaims swap
> space on swapin (2.2 reclaimed swap space on write access, which
> lead to fragmented swap space in lots of workloads).
>
> This means that a lot of memory ends up "duplicated" in RAM and
> in swap.
>
> I plan on doing some code to reclaim swap space when we run out,
> but Linus doesn't seem to like that idea very much. His argument
> (when you're OOM, you should just fail instead of limp along)
> makes a lot of sense, however, and the reclaiming of swap space
> isn't really high on my TODO list ...
>
> OTOH, for people who have swap < RAM and use it just as a small
> overflow area, Linus' argument falls short, so I guess some time
> in the future we will have code to reclaim swap space when needed.
I have some questions on this.
1) If a process uses swap space and then later (after being paged
into memory -- or even not) it completes, is killed, etc., is
the swap space reclaimed then?
2) If a process uses swap, is paged into memory, and is then swapped
out again, does it re-use the same swap as before?
If the answer to either question is no, then IMHO, that's a pretty
serious design flaw.
Regards,
/Mike
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 15 2001 - 21:00:18 EST