On Tue, 16 Feb 2010, Nick Piggin wrote: > I don't really agree with your black and white view. We equally > can't tell a lot of cases about who is pinning memory where. The > fact is that any task can be pinning memory and the heuristic > was specifically catering for that. > That's a main source of criticism of the current heuristic: it needlessly kills tasks. There is only one thing we know for certain: current is trying to allocate memory on its nodes. We can either kill a task that is allowed that same set or current itself; there's no evidence that killing anything else will lead to memory freeing that will allow the allocation to succeed. The heuristic will never perfectly select the task that it should kill 100% of the time when playing around with mempolicy nodes or cpuset mems, but relying on their current placement is a good indicator of what is more likely than not to free memory of interest. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>