Re: [RFC][DATA] re "ongoing vm suckage"

[Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>]

On Tuesday, August 07, 2001 10:04:05 AM -0700 Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@transmeta.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> 
>> Sorry, I should have warned people: pre5 is a test-release that was
>> intended solely for Leonard Zubkoff who has been helping with trying to
>> debug a FS livelock condition.
> 
> So I _think_ that what happens is:
>  - alloc_pages() itself isn't making any progress, because it's called
>    with GFP_NOFS and thus cannot touch a lot of the pages.
>  - we wake up kswapd to try to help, but kswapd doesn't do anything
>    because it thinks things are fine.

Which filesystem?  If its one of the journaled ones, other processes might
be waiting on the log trying to flush things out.

-chris

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