On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 05:25:30PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote: > 4) in page_alloc.c, the "slowdown" reschedule has been > made stronger by turning it into a try_to_free_pages(), > under memory load, this results in allocators calling > try_to_free_pages() when the amount of work to be done > isn't too bad yet and pretty much guarantees them they'll > get to do their allocation immediately afterwards ... > statistics make sure that the memory hogs are slowed down > much more than well-behaved programs There's a small problem with this one: I know that during testing of earlier 2.4 kernels we saw a livelock which was caused by the vm subsystem spinning without scheduling. This can happen in a couple of cases like NFS where another task has to be allowed to run in order to make progress in clearing pages. -ben - Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ IRC Channel: irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies Web Page: http://www.kernelnewbies.org/
