Re: [highmem bug report against -test5 and -test6] Re: [PATCH] Re:simple FS application that hangs 2.4-test5, mem mgmt problem or FS buffercache mgmt problem? (fwd)

[Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>]

On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> > > yep, this would be nice, but i think it will be quite tough to
> > > balance this properly. There are two kinds of bhs in this aging
> > > scheme: 'normal' bhs (metadata), and 'virtual' bhs (aliased to a
> > > page). Freeing a 'normal' bh will get rid of the bh, and will
> 
> > This is easy. Normal page aging will take care of the buffermem pages.
> > Freeing the buffer heads on pagecache pages is the only thing we need
> > to do in refill_inactive_scan.
> 
> to do some sort of aging is of course easy. But to treat a
> 4kbyte 'metadata bh' the same way as a 80 bytes worth 'cached
> mapping bh' is IMO a stretch. This is what i ment by 'tough to
> balance properly'.

To do that, you'd need to keep track of whether the buffer
heads (and icache/dcache entries, etc) have been accessed.
In essence an emulated accessed bit on these structures.

(and suddenly balancing is easy ... but is it worth the cost
for these small objects?)

> > > another thing is the complexity of marking a page dirty - right
> > > now we can assume that page->buffers holds all the blocks. With
> > > aging we must check wether a bh is there or not,
> > 
> > The code must already be able to handle this. This is nothing new.
> 
> sure this is new. The page->buffers list right now is assumed to
> stay constant after being created.

Eeeeeek. So pages /cannot/ lose their buffer heads ???

(I guess that explains why my buffer-head stealing code
is making trouble for the system ;))

> > > i'd love to have all the cached objects within the system on a
> > > global, size-neutral LRU list. (or at least attach a
> > > last-accessed timestamp to them.) This way we could synchronize
> > > the pagecache, inode/dentry and buffer-cache LRU lists.
> > 
> > s/LRU/page aging/   ;)
> 
> no - how does this handle the inode/dentry cache? Making
> everything a page is a mistake.

Indeed, you're right here... I'll have to think about this a
bit more (but we have the time for 2.5).

regards,

Rik
--
"What you're running that piece of shit Gnome?!?!"
       -- Miguel de Icaza, UKUUG 2000

http://www.conectiva.com/		http://www.surriel.com/

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