Re: 2.4.10 VM: what avoids from having lots of unwriteable inactive pages

[Rick Haines <rick@kuroyi.net>]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 01:13:37PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > > >
> > > > swap_out() will deactivate everything it finds to be not-recently used,
> > > > and that's how the inactive list ends up getting replenished.
> > >
> > > mlock()
> >
> > Hey, if you've mlock'ed more than your available memory, there's nothing
> > the VM layer can do. Except maybe a nice printk("Kiss your *ss goodbye");

Shouldn't there be a threshold where mlock will fail?
Or are you saying that in general mlocking lots of memory will screw the
VM?

> But if you've mlock()ed enough to clog up the inactive
> list, the VM could just move the pages it cannot free
> back to the active list and it will come across those
> pages which are freeable eventually.
> 
> Note that the maximum amount of mlock()ed memory is way
> higher than the maximum amount of pages the system puts
> on the inactive list.
> 
> (at least, it was last I looked at the maximum number
> of mlocked pages)
> 
> regards,
> 
> Rik
> --
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> 
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-- 
Rick (rick@kuroyi.net)
http://dxr3.sourceforge.net

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