kswapd problem?

Bill Hawes (whawes@star.net)
Mon, 02 Mar 1998 09:52:25 -0500

In looking through the revised kswapd code it appears to me that under some
circumstances the kswapd process would fail to sleep even after repeated
failures, stopping only when the memory objective had been reached.

Since the task state is set to TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE after the call to schedule(),
a blocking call to try_to_free_page() could cause the state to get set back to
TASK_RUNNING, which would cause it to fall through the next schedule() and do
the loop again.

It seems like this could account for some of the reports of overly-aggressive
swapping in 2.1.89-5. Have I missed something here, or is this the intended
behavior?

Regards,
Bill

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