> I've been thinking about this a bit and one possible solution would be
> to significantly lower the cost of prune_icache by removing the
> sync_all_inodes and only let it prune inodes that do not have any
> mappings associated with them. Then it might become possible to call
> it more frequently, like every time we hit do_try_free_pages.
Marcelo and me have been looking at this issue too, and have
come to almost the same conclusion as you, with one small
change.
We -need- to have a way to trigger the writeout of dirty
inodes under memory pressure. Imagine doing 'chown -R' on
a huge tree on a low-memory box; you'd end up with zillions
of dirty inodes in memory with no way to free them.
Now if prune_icache would write all the dirty inodes without
data pages to disk automatically, we'd have this issue fixed
and we'll be able to make a much more efficient prune_icache.
Anybody willing to give it a shot ?
regards,
Rik
-- Virtual memory is like a game you can't win; However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...http://www.surriel.com/ http://www.conectiva.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com.br/
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