Other thing (certainly related) what is supposed to have changed between 2.2 and 2.4.
Thanks,
Christophe
On jeu, 15 mar 2001 14:08:50 Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Mike A. Harris wrote:
>
> > Is the fact that we're supposed to use double the RAM size as
> > swap a permanent thing or a temporary annoyance that will get
> > tweaked/fixed in the future at some point during 2.4.x perhaps?
> >
> > What are the technical reasons behind this change?
>
> The reason is that the Linux 2.4 kernel no longer reclaims swap
> space on swapin (2.2 reclaimed swap space on write access, which
> lead to fragmented swap space in lots of workloads).
>
> This means that a lot of memory ends up "duplicated" in RAM and
> in swap.
>
> I plan on doing some code to reclaim swap space when we run out,
> but Linus doesn't seem to like that idea very much. His argument
> (when you're OOM, you should just fail instead of limp along)
> makes a lot of sense, however, and the reclaiming of swap space
> isn't really high on my TODO list ...
>
> OTOH, for people who have swap < RAM and use it just as a small
> overflow area, Linus' argument falls short, so I guess some time
> in the future we will have code to reclaim swap space when needed.
>
> regards,
>
> Rik
> --
> Virtual memory is like a game you can't win;
> However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...
>
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-- Christophe Barbé Software Engineer Lineo High Availability Group 42-46, rue Médéric 92110 Clichy - France phone (33).1.41.40.02.12 fax (33).1.41.40.02.01 www.lineo.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/