The current VM can get itself into trouble fairly easily on systems with a small ZONE_HIGHMEM, which is common on i686 computers with 1GB of memory. On one side, page_alloc() will allocate down to zone->pages_low, while on the other side, kswapd() and balance_pgdat() will try to free memory from every zone, until every zone has more free pages than zone->pages_high. Highmem can be filled up to zone->pages_low with page tables, ramfs, vmalloc allocations and other unswappable things quite easily and without many bad side effects, since we still have a huge ZONE_NORMAL to do future allocations from. However, as long as the number of free pages in the highmem zone is below zone->pages_high, kswapd will continue swapping things out from ZONE_NORMAL, too! Sami Farin managed to get his system into a stage where kswapd had freed about 700MB of low memory and was still "going strong". The attached patch will make kswapd stop paging out data from zones when there is more than enough memory free. We do go above zone->pages_high in order to keep pressure between zones equal in normal circumstances, but the patch should prevent the kind of excesses that made Sami's computer totally unusable. Please merge this into -mm. Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
| Greg KH | [GIT PATCH] driver core patches against 2.6.24 |
| Tarkan Erimer | Re: Dual-Licensing Linux Kernel with GPL V2 and GPL V3 |
| Srivatsa Vaddagiri | containers (was Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23) |
| Benjamin Herrenschmidt | Re: [linux-pm] [PATCH] Remove process freezer from suspend to RAM pathway |
git: | |
| David Miller | Re: [PATCH] pkt_sched: Destroy gen estimators under rtnl_lock(). |
| Gerrit Renker | [PATCH 27/37] dccp: Integration of dynamic feature activation - part 2 (server side) |
| Patrick McHardy | Re: [GIT]: Networking |
| Gerrit Renker | [PATCH 6/7] [CCID-2/3]: Fix sparse warnings |
