Re: [PATCH] mm: MADV_WILLNEED implementation for anonymous memory

[Andi Kleen]

Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> Ah, that is Lennarts Pulse Audio thing, he has samples in memory which
> might not have been used for a while, and he wants to be able to
> pre-fetch those when he suspects they might need to be played. So that
> once the audio thread comes along and stuffs them down /dev/dsp its all
> nice in memory.

The real problem that seems to make swapping so slow is that the data
tends to be badly fragmented on the swap partition. I suspect if that
problem was attached the need for such prefetching would be far less
because swap in would be much faster.

-Andi
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