Re: 2.4.16 & OOM killer screw up (fwd)

[Abraham vd Merwe <abraham@2d3d.co.za>]

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Hi Andrea!

> > > > In my swapless testing, I burnt HUGE amounts of CPU in flush_tlb_others().
> > > > So we're madly trying to swap pages out and finding that there's no swap
> > > > space.  I beleive that when we find there's no swap left we should move
> > > > the page onto the active list so we don't keep rescanning it pointlessly.
> > > 
> > > yes, however I think the swap-flood with no swap isn't a very
> > > interesting case to optimize.
> > 
> > Running swapless is a valid configuration, and the kernel is doing
> 
> I'm not saying it's not valid or non interesting.
> 
> It's the mix "I'm running out of memory and I'm swapless" that is the
> case not interesting to optimize.
> 
> If you're swapless it means you've enough memory and that you're not
> running out of swap. Otherwise _you_ (not the kernel) are wrong not
> having swap.

The problem is that your VM is unnecesarily eating up memory and then wants
swap. That is unacceptable. Having 90% of your memory in buffers/cache and
then the OOM killer kicks in because nothing is free is what we're moaning
about.

-- 

Regards
 Abraham

Did you hear about the model who sat on a broken bottle and cut a nice figure?

__________________________________________________________
 Abraham vd Merwe - 2d3D, Inc.

 Device Driver Development, Outsourcing, Embedded Systems

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