Kswapd future (was: Re: new kmod.c - debuggers and testers needed)

[Rik van Riel <H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl>]

On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Perry Harrington wrote:

> > On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Perry Harrington wrote:
> > 
> > >                                                           Threads
> > > are useful in their appropriate context, and kswapd, and kmod would benefit
> > > from them.
> > 
> > Hmm, maybe it would be useful for kswapd and bdflush to fork()
> > off threads to do the actual disk I/O, so the main thread won't
> > be blocked and paused... This could remove some bottlenecks.
> 
> I was thinking that kswapd could use some of it's spare time to do an LRU
> paging scan, consolidate free space, and possibly do remapping of process
> memory spaces to make them more efficient (map pages to contiguous chunks
> of memory and swap).

Unfortunately, kswapd doesn't have such a thing as 'spare time'.
It is a kernel daemon that does what's neccessary, but we want
to keep it's CPU/IO footprint absolutely minimal since all other
applications are more important...

Rik.
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