Linux-kernel mailing list archive 2000-53,: Re: [RFC] Generic deferred file writing

# Re: [RFC] Generic deferred file writing

Eric W. Biederman (ebiederman@uswest.net)
30 Dec 2000 17:26:58 -0700

- Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]
- Next message: Manfred: "oops with 2.4.0-test13-pre7 in acpi_ns_get_next_object"
- Previous message: davej@suse.de: "Re: TEST13-PRE7 - Nvidia Kernel Module Compile Problem"
- In reply to: Linus Torvalds: "Re: [RFC] Generic deferred file writing"

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> writes:

> On 30 Dec 2000, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> >
> > One other thing to think about for the VFS/MM layer is limiting the
> > total number of dirty pages in the system (to what disk pressure shows
> > the disk can handle), to keep system performance smooth when swapping.
>
> This is a separate issue, and I think that it is most closely tied in to
> the "RSS limit" kind of patches because of the memory mapping issues. If
> you've seen the RSS rlimit patch (it's been posted a few times this week),
> then you could think of that modified by a "Resident writable pages Set
> Size" approach.

Building on the RSS limit approach sounds much simpler then they way
I was thinking.

> Not just for shared mappings - this is also an issue with
> limiting swapout.
>
> (I actually don't think that RSS is all that interesting, it's really the
> "potentially dirty RSS" that counts for VM behaviour - everything else can
> be dropped easily enough)

Definitely.

Now the only tricky bit is how do we sense when we are overloading
the swap disks. Well that is the next step. I'll take a look
and see what it takes to keep statistics on dirty mapped pages.

Eric
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

- Next message: Manfred: "oops with 2.4.0-test13-pre7 in acpi_ns_get_next_object"
- Previous message: davej@suse.de: "Re: TEST13-PRE7 - Nvidia Kernel Module Compile Problem"
- In reply to: Linus Torvalds: "Re: [RFC] Generic deferred file writing"