Re: Notebooks

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Tue, 18 Aug 1998 23:54:00 -0700 (PDT)


On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> should read
>
> current->flags &= ~PF_MEMALLOC;
>
> I suspect 2.1.116 is stable, but due to the above thing it probably
> doesn't page out things as well as it should (leaving too much to kswapd).
> Although what do I know - it might actually do pretty well.

I got a few queries on this comment already..

The thing is that kswapd should notice so quickly these days that the
machine is low on memory that it normally really shouldn't matter what we
do in "try_to_free_pages()", so even the above complete breakage might no
thave all that much of a negative impact on real-life situations.

As it stands, 2.1.116 definitely will have some really bad behaviour when
you run out of swap, and I suspect it has fp problems too. I was just so
happy that I no longer could crash it that I didn't look through the
patches as carefully as I usually do (I found the breakage later on when I
actually _did_ do my normal "let's check the patches out" thing).

Linus

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