Re: [PATCH] vfs: keep inodes with page cache off the inode shrinker LRU

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Tue Feb 11 2020 - 19:47:05 EST


On Tue, 11 Feb 2020 16:28:39 -0800 Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 3:44 PM Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Testing this will be a challenge, but the issue was real - a 7GB
> > highmem machine isn't crazy and I expect the inode has become larger
> > since those days.
>
> Hmm. I would say that in the intening years a 7GB highmem machine has
> indeed become crazy.
>
> It used to be something we kind of supported.
>
> But we really should consider HIGHMEM to be something that is on the
> deprecation list. In this day and age, there is no excuse for running
> a 32-bit kernel with lots of physical memory.
>
> And if you really want to do that, and have some legacy hardware with
> a legacy use case, maybe you should be using a legacy kernel.
>
> I'd personally be perfectly happy to start removing HIGHMEM support again.
>

That would be nice.

What's the situation with highmem on ARM?