On Sun, 26 Mar 2000, Kanoj Sarcar wrote:

What is the problem that your patch is fixing?

I agree with Rik's patch - the old behaviour kicked us out of the regular
loop whenever "need_resched" was set, and that is not necessarily a good
idea at all.

From a conceptual standpoint, going to sleep when "need_resched" gets set

is not the right thing at all - the flag doesn't really have any bearing
on whether kswapd should sleep, it only has meaning from a scheduling
latency standpoint (ie "need_resched" does not mean "go to sleep", it
means "let somebody else run now" - different things).

On the other hand you're definitely right that this is not a new bug
introduced by you, Kanoj - this seems to be just a thinko that has been
there for a long long time. And I suspect I may have been the original
perpetrator of the crime.

The new code looks much saner: it reschedules when asked to, and it stops
looping when it makes sense (ie when there is no longer any reason to free
pages). Instead of mixing the two up.

		Linus

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