Re: [RFC] Fine-grained memory priorities and PI

From: Kyle Moffett
Date: Thu Dec 15 2005 - 07:58:59 EST


On Dec 15, 2005, at 07:45, Con Kolivas wrote:
I have some basic process-that-called the memory allocator link in the -ck tree already which alters how aggressively memory is reclaimed according to priority. It does not affect out of memory management but that could be added to said algorithm; however I don't see much point at the moment since oom is still an uncommon condition but regular memory allocation is routine.

My thought would be to generalize the two special cases of writeback of dirty pages or dropping of clean pages under memory pressure and OOM to be the same general case. When you are trying to free up pages, it may be permissible to drop dirty mbox pages and kill the postfix process writing them in order to satisfy allocations for the mission-critical database server. (Or maybe it's the other way around). If a large chunk of the allocated pages have priorities and lossless/lossy free functions, then the kernel can be much more flexible and configurable about what to do when running low on RAM.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

--
I lost interest in "blade servers" when I found they didn't throw knives at people who weren't supposed to be in your machine room.
-- Anthony de Boer


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