From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from neon.transmeta.com (neon-best.transmeta.com [206.184.214.10]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id SAA31351 for ; Wed, 25 Mar 1998 18:40:57 -0500 Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 15:40:29 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: free_memory_available() bug in pre-91-1 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: "H.H.vanRiel" Cc: linux-mm List-ID: On Wed, 25 Mar 1998, H.H.vanRiel wrote: > > I've just found a bug in free_memory_available() as > implemented in pre-91-1... Ugh, yes. How about pre-91-2, which I just put out? It has more of the code the way I _think_ it should be, and it should try a lot harder to not hog the CPU with kswapd. On a 512MB machine, the "tries" variable easily defaulted to try to page out 8192 pages at a time, which was what we in the business call "Bad For Interactive Use" (TM). The new one tries to throw out much fewer pages, and is happier about being called more often - so kswapd really should be more of a "background" thing rather than quite easily becoming foregrounded. All of this is completely untested in real life, but has gone through the very strict "Looks Ok To Me" bs-filter. Thus it is obviously perfect and can have no bugs. As such everybody should immediately upgrade and be happy forever after. Linus