Re: 2.4.10 VM: what avoids from having lots of unwriteable inactive

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
>
> We keep calling swap_out(), which will not deactivate pages which _can_ be
> written out, until we deactivate the pte's from the pages which are on the
> inactive list.

swap_out() will deactivate everything it finds to be not-recently used,
and that's how the inactive list ends up getting replenished.

But if you want to put an unconditional "refill_inactive()" after the
inactive shrink failed, just to work with the case of the active list
having a lot of interesting pages. That's not a mapped vs unmapped issue,
that's more a "maybe all the DMA pages are on the active list" kind of
thing.

		Linus