Re: [PATCH] add some drop_caches documentation and info messsge

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 23:06:00 +0200
Borislav Petkov [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 01:48:36PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

quoted

Well who knows. Could be that people's vm *does* suck. Or they have
some particularly peculiar worklosd or requirement[*]. Or their VM
*used* to suck, and the drop_caches is not really needed any more but
it's there in vendor-provided code and they can't practically prevent
it.

I have drop_caches in my suspend-to-disk script so that the hibernation
image is kept at minimum and suspend times are as small as possible.

hm, that sounds smart.

Would that be a valid use-case?

I'd say so, unless we change the kernel to do that internally.  We do
have the hibernation-specific shrink_all_memory() in the vmscan code. 
We didn't see fit to document _why_ that exists, but IIRC it's there to
create enough free memory for hibernation to be able to successfully
complete, but no more.

Who owns hibernaton nowadays?  Rafael, I guess?

--
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/ .
Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@kvack.org"> email@kvack.org </a>