swapping algorithm in 2.1.91

Andrew J. Anderson (andrew@db.erau.edu)
Sat, 28 Mar 1998 18:10:24 -0500 (EST)

Linus wrote:
>This is intentional. The background swapping tries to swap out enough
>stuff that we're never really low on memory (and that means that it
>tries to keep at least one 128kB _contiguous_ area free, for example -
>which in turn tends to indicate a few megs of real free memory).

How is this going to affect "small" machines? I've got a terminal server
with only 4 megs of ram in it -- will the new code "do the right thing"
and try to keep less than a few megs of real free memory available?

I'm still trying to boot a machine with "mem=4m" -- it refuses to dip
below 1540k free with 2612k/4096k left after booting. Can there be a boot
option to not hold the memory this aggressively? The machine is swapping
to death.

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Andrew Anderson http://amelia.db.erau.edu/~andrew/
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