RE: Kswapd flaw

From: Al Boldi
Date: Tue Jun 28 2005 - 09:02:48 EST


Hi Nix, how are you?
You wrote: {
On 28 Jun 2005, Al Boldi yowled:
> Nix wrote:
>> On 28 Jun 2005, Al Boldi murmured woefully:
>>> Kswapd starts evicting processes to fullfil a malloc, when it should
>>> just deny it because there is no swap.
>> I can't even tell what you're expecting. Surely not that no pages are
>> ever evicted or flushed; your memory would fill up with page cache in no
time.
>
> Please do flush anytime, and do it in sync during OOMs; but don't
> evict procs especially not RUNNING procs, that is overkill.

Would you really like a system where once something was faulted in, it could
never leave? You'd run out of memory *awfully* fast.
}

Nix,
You should only fault if you have a place to fault to, as into a swap.
Without swap faulting is overkill.

Is it possible to change kswapd's default behaviour to not fault if there is
no swap?

Thanks!

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