On Wed, Mar 04, 2015 at 10:04:36AM -0500, Johannes Weiner wrote: > Yes, we can make this work if you can tell us which allocations have > limited/controllable lifetime. It may be helpful to be a bit precise about definitions here. There are a number of different object lifetimes: a) will be released before the kernel thread returns control to userspace b) will be released once the current I/O operation finishes. (In the case of nbd where the remote server has unexpectedy gone away might be quite a while, but I'm not sure how much we care about that scenario) c) can be trivially released if the mm subsystem asks via calling a shrinker d) can be released only after doing some amount of bounded work (i.e., cleaning a dirty page) e) impossible to predict when it can be released (e.g., dcache, inodes attached to an open file descriptors, buffer heads that won't be freed until the file system is umounted, etc.) I'm guessing that what you mean is (b), but what about cases such as (c)? Would the mm subsystem find it helpful if it had more information about object lifetime? For example, the CMA folks seem to really care about know whether memory allocations falls in category (e) or not. - Ted -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>