Re: [patch] adjustments to dirty memory thresholds

[William Lee Irwin III]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 09:39:09PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> These ratios are scaled so that as the highmem:lowmem ratio goes
> beyond 4:1, the maximum amount of allowed dirty memory ceases to
> increase.  It is clamped at the amount of memory which a 4:1 machine
> is allowed to use.

This is disturbing. I suspect this is only going to raise poor memory
utilization issues on highmem boxen. Of course, "f**k highmem" is such
a common refrain these days so that's probably falling on deaf ears.
AFAICT the OOM issues are largely a by-product of mempool allocations
entering out_of_memory() when they have the perfectly reasonable
alternative strategy of simply waiting for the mempool to refill.

Cheers,
Bill