Re: Re: Re: Regarding the gfp mask "GFP_NOFS"

[Mulyadi Santosa <mulyadi.santosa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rajat...

> Do linux systems have swap files?? Isn't swap space provided (only) by
> the swap partition?

Yes, you can format a blank file and format it as swap. Later, you 
mount it (mkswap). In the end, you get another swap area,
only this time it is not a partition.

>Ummm ... not sure ... but just a direction to think upon. There memory
>occupied by VFS / filesystems may be holding some buffers (of certain
>files). So a file system request may be used to flush these buffers to
>the disk, and thus free memory to be returned.

Hm, I agree with the idea above. Page cache can be simply dropped to 
provide more space, but first it needs to be sync'ed. That's where filesystem
operation comes from..

regards,

Mulyadi


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