> > I have come to the opinion that kswapd needs to be a little smarter
> > -- if it doesn't find anything to swap shouldn't it go to sleep a
> > little longer before trying again? That way it could gracefully
> > degrade itself when it's not making any progress.
> >
> > In my testing (on a dual 1Ghz/2G machine) the machine "locks up" for
> > long periods of time while kswapd runs around trying to do it's
> > thing. If I could disable kswapd I would just to test this.
>
> Your wish is my command. This patch provides a crude-but-effective
> method of disabling kswapd, using:
>
> echo 1 >/proc/sys/kernel/disable_kswapd
>
> I tested this with dbench and found it runs about half as fast, but
> runs. This is reassuring because kswapd is supposed to be doing
> something useful.
Why not just killall -STOP kswapd?
What is expected state of system without kswapd, BTW? Without kflushd,
I give up guaranteed time to get data safely to disk [and its usefull
for spindown]. What happens without kswapd?
Pavel
-- Philips Velo 1: 1"x4"x8", 300gram, 60, 12MB, 40bogomips, linux, mutt, details at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/velo/index.html.- 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/