Rik van Riel wrote:

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Benjamin LaHaise wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 02:02:03PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

quoted

But let's back off a bit.   The problem is that a process
doing a large write() can penalise innocent processes which
want to allocate memory.

How to fix that?

First off, make it obvious where we block in the allocation path (pawning
off all memory reaping to kswapd et al is an easy first step here).  Then
make allocators cycle through on a FIFO basis by using something like the
page reservation patch I came up with a while ago.  That'll give us an
easy place to change scheduling behaviour.

These ingredients are already in 2.4-rmap.

It doesn't seem to work.  The -ac kernel has weird stalls on storms
of ext3 writeback.  It's quite irritating, although probably not to
do with the VM.

The scheduler in the -ac kernel is also bad.  Start a kernel build
and things like X apps and gdb become hugely slow.  2.5 is like that
too.  I'll be going back to Marcelo.
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