linux-kernel - Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23

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Message-ID: <20070725115012.GB27498@elte.hu>
Date:	Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:50:12 +0200
From:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
To:	Rene Herman <rene.herman@...il.com>
Cc:	Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu, david@...g.hm,
	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>,
	Ray Lee <ray-lk@...rabbit.org>,
	Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@...il.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	ck list <ck@....kolivas.org>, Paul Jackson <pj@....com>,
	linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: -mm merge plans for 2.6.23

* Rene Herman <rene.herman@...il.com> wrote:

> > and the fact is: updatedb discards a considerable portion of the 
> > cache completely unnecessarily: on a reasonably complex box no way 
> > do all the inodes and dentries fit into all of RAM, so we just trash 
> > everything.
> 
> Okay, but unless I've now managed to really quite horribly confuse 
> myself, that wouldn't have anything to do with _swap_ prefetch would 
> it?

it's connected: it would remove updatedb from the VM picture altogether. 
(updatedb would just cycle through the files with leaving minimal cache 
disturbance.)

hence swap-prefetch could concentrate on the cases where it makes sense 
to start swap prefetching _without_ destroying other, already cached 
content: such as when a large app exits and frees gobs of memory back 
into the buddy allocator. _That_ would be a definitive "no costs and 
side-effects" point for swap-prefetch to kick in, and it would eliminate 
this pretty artificial (and unnecessary) 'desktop versus server' 
controversy and would turn it into a 'helps everyone' feature.

	Ingo
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