Re: Q about pagecache data never written to disk

[William Lee Irwin III]

William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> Dirty memory "limits" have no force as applied to mmap() IO, which is
>> not a pretty state of affairs with respect to various attempts the VM
>> makes at mitigating data structure proliferation associated with dirty
>> data.

On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 03:14:09AM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> Yeah I know. data structure proliferation and just the simple fact
> that it can't immediately be freed is a problem.
> What is the alternative? Take a fault every time we write to a clean,
> mmapped page?

That's the only option I'm now aware of. I suspect it may make sense to
try it to get a notion of just how large the performance impact is so
it's cost can be properly weighed against the expected stability
benefit. But it's also worth noting that with some care the additional
fault may be circumvented in some performance-relevant instances.


-- wli
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