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Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 13:08:57 -0700
From: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@zip.com.au>
Cc: lkml <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [patch] adjustments to dirty memory thresholds
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On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 09:39:09PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> These ratios are scaled so that as the highmem:lowmem ratio goes
> beyond 4:1, the maximum amount of allowed dirty memory ceases to
> increase.  It is clamped at the amount of memory which a 4:1 machine
> is allowed to use.

This is disturbing. I suspect this is only going to raise poor memory
utilization issues on highmem boxen. Of course, "f**k highmem" is such
a common refrain these days so that's probably falling on deaf ears.
AFAICT the OOM issues are largely a by-product of mempool allocations
entering out_of_memory() when they have the perfectly reasonable
alternative strategy of simply waiting for the mempool to refill.


Cheers,
Bill