Re: kswapd etc hogging machine

From: Daniel Phillips (phillips@bonn-fries.net)
Date: Thu Jan 03 2002 - 00:48:47 EST


On January 3, 2002 06:15 am, Andrew Morton wrote:
> And we, the kernel developers, should hang our heads over this. A
> vendor-released, stable kernel is performing terribly with such a
> simple workload. One year after the release of 2.4.0!

To be fair, in the year leading up to 2.4.0 much energy was expended on
getting the bugs out of the unified and heaviliy threaded page+buffer
cache[1], at the expense of work on the memory manager, so 2001 ended up
being like a whole new kernel cycle. Anyway, the saving grace is that 2.2
managed to metamorphose from ugly duckling to... quite a nice duck, with
almost all the features of 2.4 from the user's point of view. So everybody
has something to run.

With 20 20 hindsight, the VM work could have been managed better but I don't
see why anybody's head needs to be hung. It was a bumpy road, we had to
change a few tires, but we got to the other side of the mountain.

--
Daniel

[1] According to Matt Dillon's interview today, FreeBSD went through the same pain unifying their caches, and they have yet to seriously tackle the SMP issues. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



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