Re: [CFT][PATCH] smoother VM for -ac

[Benjamin LaHaise]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 05:25:30PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 4) in page_alloc.c, the "slowdown" reschedule has been
>    made stronger by turning it into a try_to_free_pages(),
>    under memory load, this results in allocators calling
>    try_to_free_pages() when the amount of work to be done
>    isn't too bad yet and pretty much guarantees them they'll
>    get to do their allocation immediately afterwards ...
>    statistics make sure that the memory hogs are slowed down
>    much more than well-behaved programs

There's a small problem with this one: I know that during testing of 
earlier 2.4 kernels we saw a livelock which was caused by the vm 
subsystem spinning without scheduling.  This can happen in a couple of 
cases like NFS where another task has to be allowed to run in order to 
make progress in clearing pages.

		-ben