On 11/21/2010 09:30 AM, Minchan Kim wrote:
Recently, there are reported problem about thrashing. (http://marc.info/?l=rsync&m=128885034930933&w=2) It happens by backup workloads(ex, nightly rsync). That's because the workload makes just use-once pages and touches pages twice. It promotes the page into active list so that it results in working set page eviction. Some app developer want to support POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE. But other OSes don't support it, either. (http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=128928979512086&w=2) By Other approach, app developer uses POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED. But it has a problem. If kernel meets page is writing during invalidate_mapping_pages, it can't work. It is very hard for application programmer to use it. Because they always have to sync data before calling fadivse(..POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) to make sure the pages could be discardable. At last, they can't use deferred write of kernel so that they could see performance loss. (http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/fadvise.html)
This looks promising... Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> -- All rights reversed -- 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/ . Fight unfair telecom policy in Canada: sign http://dissolvethecrtc.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>