Relation between nr_dirty and nr_inactive

From: Kunal Trivedi
Date: Thu Nov 29 2007 - 19:19:08 EST


Hi,
I am running older kernel (CentOS 2.6.9-34 SMP) on 32 bit arch. Some
of my systems got hung, while trying to write some data to disk. All
those systems exhibit similar pattern where during this time,
/proc/meminfo suggesting 'Inactive' < 'Dirty'. All of machines have 2G
of physical memory and ~1.5G memory is locked (via mlock).

I tried reading code but could not establish any direct relationship
between Zone->in_active pages vs. per-cpu_page_state->nr_dirty.

Has anybody seen system in this kind of state before ? And are these 2
parameters affect each-other ?

Thanks
-Kunal
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