Rik van Riel wrote:

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:

quoted

quoted

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.

Maybe you shouldn't have cut off the other line from my
2-line mail ;)))

The most probable reason for the stalls is the fact that
page_launder (like shrink_cache) will try to write out
the complete inactive list if it's almost full of dirty
pages, so the system will still be stuck in __get_request_wait
seconds after the first few megabytes of the paged out
inactive pages have been cleaned already.

I doubt if it's that, although it might be.

It happens just during a kernel build, 768M of RAM.  And/or
during big CVS operations.  Possibly it's due to ext3 checkpointing.
In ordered data mode with these workloads, kupdate should normally
be doing that, so it may be a kupdate problem, or a missing
wakeup_bdflush.

It's not a big issue - people would be unlikely to notice unless
they were switching between kernels, and were ravingly impatient,
like me.
--
To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in
the body to majordomo@kvack.org.  For more info on Linux MM,
see: http://www.linux-mm.org/