On 6 January 2011 10:46, Mel Gorman [off-list ref] wrote:

The current reclaim algorithm is a mash of a number of different
algorithms with a number of modifications for catching corner cases and
various optimisations. In terms of an MSc, your best bet is to do a
general literature review of replacement algorithms and then do your
best to write a short paper describing the Linux page replacement
algorithm identifying which replacement algorithms it takes lessons
from.

Thanks for this - I am indeed reading through the various papers and other
literature (and I bought your book), though my aim with the MSc project is
slightly more abitious than maybe you are suggesting: I want to look at how
important some of the issues that are identified as common problems with
global clock and similar replacement algorithms (eg a slow response to
changes in locality) and to test whether there are some heuristics from
local replacement policies that might address them, at least in theory.

The Clock-Pro paper was an interesting read and given its claims for
improvement in the 2.4 series kernels I was interested in seeing how far the
idea had got in the 2.6 series.

Adrian