On (07/13/15 02:03), Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 03:52:53PM +0900, Sergey Senozhatsky wrote: > > Why? In some sense, shrinker callbacks are just a way to be nice. > > No one writes a driver just to be able to handle shrinker calls. An > > ability to react to those calls is just additional option; it does > > not directly affect or limit driver's functionality (at least, it > > really should not). > > No, they are not just nice. They are a fundamental part of memory > management and required to reclaim (often large) amounts of memory. Yes. 'Nice' used in a sense that drivers have logic to release the memory anyway; mm asks volunteers (the drivers that have registered shrinker callbacks) to release some spare/wasted/etc. when things are getting tough (the drivers are not aware of that in general). This is surely important to mm, not to the driver though -- it just agrees to be 'nice', but even not expected to release any memory at all (IOW, this is not a contract). -ss -- 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>