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Message-Id: <20080131021949.92715ba4.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:19:49 -0800
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To: Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>, hugh@...itas.com,
linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org, npiggin@...e.de,
riel@...hat.com, mztabzr@...inter.de, mpm@...enic.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: MADV_WILLNEED implementation for anonymous memory
On Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:15:08 +0100 Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org> wrote:
> Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl> writes:
> >
> > Ah, that is Lennarts Pulse Audio thing, he has samples in memory which
> > might not have been used for a while, and he wants to be able to
> > pre-fetch those when he suspects they might need to be played. So that
> > once the audio thread comes along and stuffs them down /dev/dsp its all
> > nice in memory.
>
> The real problem that seems to make swapping so slow is that the data
> tends to be badly fragmented on the swap partition. I suspect if that
> problem was attached the need for such prefetching would be far less
> because swap in would be much faster.
>
Yeah, the 2.5 switch to physical scanning killed us there.
I still don't know why my allocate-swapspace-according-to-virtual-address
change didn't help. Much. Marcelo played with that a bit too.
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