Re: kswapd logic improvement

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>]

On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> here's another short patch for 2.1.88. Basically
> it improves the kswapd logic. Currently kswapd
> will give up when it fails three times in a row,
> even when it hasn't any memory yet.

Look at the pre-89's on ftp.kernel.org - I changed kswapd around quite a
bit, because I want the machine to remain up when you get lots of atomic
get_free_page() calls that would otherwise not even have woken up kswapd
depending on how "min_pages_free" was set up and what the fragmentation
was. 

I'm not saying that the pre-89 is any better, but it is sufficiently
different that I'd like to hear comments about it. I suspect it really
needs tweaking kswapd, for example - it might result in bad latency right
now because kswapd is so high-priority and if it isn't able to unfragment
easily it might run for a while.. 

Could you send patches relative to that (including your other patch, I'd
be happier to know that you've tested that patch against my current kernel
too),

		Linus