Re: 'disposable' dirty pages [was: Out Of Memory in v. 2.1]

Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com)
Thu, 8 Oct 1998 13:22:37 -0400 (EDT)


On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Alan Cox wrote:

> > Which isn't quite true, unfortunately. To make this true, the act of
> > making the page DISCARDABLE should also zero it. Otherwise, you can tell
> > whether a page was discarded by whether it contains data, which in turn
>
> Not if you marked it discardable - you just said that zeroed it.

Well, that's the issue. It's more efficient if it doesn't.

> Since a page thats discarded will be returned as zero you just need a flag
> around if you care. Another approach would be to fault such pages so you
> pick up the buserr

Or just set up DISCARDABLE to at read/write not only clears the
DISCARDABLE flag, but also zeros the memory. That would make it
indistinguishable from a zero mapping.

Hmm... It's starting to sound like we are reinventing either zero mapping,
or lazy clear of zero pages...

-- 
Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com, CIS: 70705,126)

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