On July 21, 2002 07:24 am, Craig Kulesa wrote:
> This patch is intermediate between where we were (freeing slab caches
> blindly and not in tune with the rest of the VM), and where we want to be
> (cache pruning by page as we scan the active list looking for cold pages
> to deactivate). Uhhh, well, I *think* that's where we want to be. :)
>
> How do we get there?
>
> Given a slab page, I can find out what cachep and slab I'm dealing with
> (via GET_PAGE_SLAB and friends). If the cache is prunable one,
> cachep->pruner tells me what kind of callback (dcache/inode/dquot) I
> should invoke to prune the page. No problem.
>
> The trouble comes when we try to replace shrink_dcache_memory() and
> friends with slab-aware pruners. Namely, how to teach those
> inode/dcache/dquot callbacks to free objects belonging to a *specified*
> page or slab? If I have a dentry slab, I'd like to try to liberate
> *those* dentries, not some random ones like shrink_dcache_memory does now.
Well not quite random. It prunes the oldest entries. The idea behind the prunable
callback is that some caches have specific aging methods. What I tried to do here
was keep the rate of aging in sync with the VM.
> I'm still trying to figure out how to make that work. Or is that
> totally the wrong approach? Thoughts? ;)
Thats a question I have asked myself too. What could be done is, scan the
entries in the slab encountered, using a call back, free them if they are purgeable.
If this ends up producing an empty slab, release it.
>Intermezzo has a funky dentry cache that may need a pruner method (??),
>but I didn't touch it. If there was a better way to do this, I was too
>blind to see it.
Looking at the Intermezzo dcache code, I think you made the right choise.
I do not think this needs a pruner method.
Ed Tomlinson
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