Re: How to reclaim inode pages on demand

[Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>]

On Mon, 8 Aug 2005, Jörn Engel wrote:

> On Mon, 8 August 2005 16:52:52 +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> >
> > I am working on a direct reclaim strategy to free up large blocks of
> > contiguous pages. The part I have is working fine, but I am finding a
> > hundreds of pages that are being used for inodes that I need to reclaim. I
> > tried purging the inode lists using a variation of prune_icache() but it
> > is not working out.
> >
> > Given a struct page, that one knows is an inode, can anyone suggest the
> > best way to find the inode using it and free it?
>
> A struct page ain't an inode.  So I'm assuming you mean something like
> "giving a struct page that is known to be part of the inode slab
> cache".
>

I explained this badly.

Inodes have access to an address_space via inode->i_data. This
address_space is used to allocate pages from functions like
page_cache_alloc() or grab_cache_page(). It is these pages that are the
problem, not the slab pages holding the inode structures. The question is
how these pages can be directly reclaimed. Does anyone have suggestions?


-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Java Applications Developer
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab