From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263861AbTEGPH6 (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 May 2003 11:07:58 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263869AbTEGPH6 (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 May 2003 11:07:58 -0400 Received: from watch.techsource.com ([209.208.48.130]:177 "EHLO techsource.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263861AbTEGPHr (ORCPT ); Wed, 7 May 2003 11:07:47 -0400 Message-ID: <3EB9250A.8030306@techsource.com> Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 11:23:54 -0400 From: Timothy Miller User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: William Lee Irwin III CC: Torsten Landschoff , J?rn Engel , Linux kernel Subject: Re: top stack (l)users for 2.5.69 References: <20030507132024.GB18177@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> <20030507135657.GC18177@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> <20030507143315.GA6879@stargate.galaxy> <20030507144736.GE8978@holomorphy.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org William Lee Irwin III wrote: > > The kernel stack is (in Linux) unswappable memory that persists > throughout the lifetime of a thread. It's basically how many threads > you want to be able to cram into a system, and it matters a lot for > 32-bit. > > The point that may or may not have been obvious is that more than one kernel stack is hanging around. One single 8k stack versus one single 4k stack is a trivial difference, even for most embedded systems. But this becomes a huge problem when you have numerous concurrent threads hanging around, one of which can be swapped out. That eats memory fast. Or am I getting it wrong?