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

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, Rick Haines wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 01:13:37PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > swap_out() will deactivate everything it finds to be not-recently used,
> > > > > and that's how the inactive list ends up getting replenished.
> > > >
> > > > mlock()
> > >
> > > Hey, if you've mlock'ed more than your available memory, there's nothing
> > > the VM layer can do. Except maybe a nice printk("Kiss your *ss goodbye");
> 
> Shouldn't there be a threshold where mlock will fail?

There is (for users). Take a look at ulimit:

 -l     The maximum size that may be locked into memory

> Or are you saying that in general mlocking lots of memory will screw the
> VM?

Yes it will.