Re: cp file /dev/zero <-> cache [was Re: increasing page size]

Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm+eric@npwt.net)
06 Jul 1998 08:37:02 -0500


>>>>> "ST" == Stephen C Tweedie <sct@redhat.com> writes:

ST> It does: the Duff's device in try_to_free_page does it, and seems to
ST> work well enough. It was certainly tuned tightly enough: all of the
ST> hard part of getting the kswap stuff working well in try_to_swap_out()
ST> was to do with tuning the aggressiveness of swap relative to the buffer
ST> and cache reclaim mechanisms so that the try_to_free_page loop works
ST> well. That's why the recent policies of adding little rules here and
ST> there all over the mm layer have disturbed the balance so much, I think.

The use of touch_page and age_page appear to be the most likely
canidates for the page cache being more persistent than it used to
be.

If I'm not mistaken shrink_mmap must be called more often now to
remove a given page.

Eric

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu