Re: XFS and journalling filesystems

Jeff Merkey (jmerkey@timpanogas.com)
Tue, 1 Jun 1999 16:20:03 -0600

Linux does have a lot of problems with physical memory being used by file
systems, particularly those that need a lot of it. The "...could not get a
free page..." error from kmalloc can be nasty, particularly since it's error
return code for GFP_KERNEL is undefined, and can cause system crashes. I've
put the same file system code base on both NT and Linux, and Linux seems to
get into serious problems when you exhaust the physical memory pool. What
makes it even more convoluted for programmers is the fact that vmalloc
doesn't support a robust byte allocator, which means you have to write your
own. At some point, something similar to the ExAllocPagePool and
ExAllocNonPagedPool calls in Windows NT should be implemented in the MM for
those of us who don't like being forced to dance around the current
limitations in the Linux kernel with regard to robust vm memory management.

Jeff

----- Original Message -----
From: Nickolay Kolchin <snob@snob.spb.ru>
To: <linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 3:44 PM
Subject: Re: XFS and journalling filesystems

> ÷ÔÒ, 01 éÀÎ 1999, David S. Miller wrote
> > Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1999 02:15:17 -0700
> > From: Dan Koren <dkoren@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com>
> >
> > I'm afraid your concerns about kernel code size eating into buffer
> > cache or user memory are slightly out of date. These days it seems
> > damn near impossible to buy anything with less than 32 MB memory!
> >
> > There are third world countries where Linux is used heavily where a
> > 486 with 16MB of ram is a "big computer". These concerns are by no
> > means out of date at all.
> >
>
> You don't need XFS on such systems.
>
> ------
> Intel: where Quality is job number 0.9998782345!
> ------
> Nickolay Semyonov
>
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