Re: lowmem_reserve (replaces protection)

From: Andrea Arcangeli
Date: Tue Oct 26 2004 - 19:56:35 EST


On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 08:31:32PM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Nick Piggin wrote:
>
> > OK that makes sense... it isn't the length of the name, but the fact
> > that that naming convention hasn't proliferated thoughout the 2.6 tree;
>
> Speaking about not proliferating...
>
> One thing we need to make sure of is that the lower zone
> protection stuff doesn't put the allocation threshold
> higher than kswapd's freeing threshold.

I agree. I didn't introduce that bug, the very same problem would happen
with the previous protection code. So this is not a regression, I'm far
from finished... I'm just trying to post orthogonal patches, since Hugh
had a much better merging success rate with small patches (though I find
very hard to produce small patches myself when there's more than one
thing to fix in the same file).

the per-classzone kswapd treshold was very well taken care of in 2.4,
thanks the watermarks embedding the low/min/high and the classzone being
passed up to the kswapd wakeup function.

> Otherwise on a 1GB system, we'll end up cycling most of
> userspace allocations through the 128MB highmem zone,
> instead of falling back to the other zones.

that's the side effect of the per-zone lru too (though I'm not going to
change the lru).
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/