(patches against 2.6.20-mm1) There is a fundamental deadlock associated with paging; when writing out a page to free memory requires free memory to complete. The usually solution is to keep a small amount of memory available at all times so we can overcome this problem. This however assumes the amount of memory needed for writeout is (constant and) smaller than the provided reserve.
It is this latter assumption that breaks when doing writeout over network. Network can take up an unspecified amount of memory while waiting for a reply to our write request. This re-introduces the deadlock; we might never complete the writeout, for we might not have enough memory to receive the completion message. The proposed solution is simple, only allow traffic servicing the VM to make use of the reserves. Since the VM is always present to service, this limited amount of memory can sustain a full connection; after a packet has been processed its memory can be re-used for the next packet. This however implies you know what packets are for whom, which generally speaking you don't. Hence we need to receive all packets but discard them as soon as we encounter a non VM bound packet allocated from the reserves. Also knowing it is headed towards the VM needs a little help, hence we introduce the socket flag SOCK_VMIO to mark sockets with. Of course, since we are paging all this has to happen in kernel-space, since user-space might just not be there. Since packet processing might also require memory, this all also implies that those auxiliary allocations may use the reserves when an emergency packet is processed. This is accomplished by using PF_MEMALLOC. How much memory is to be reserved is also an issue, enough memory to saturate both the route cache and IP fragment reassembly, along with various constants. This patch-set comes in 5 parts: 1) introduce the memory reserve and make the SLAB allocator play nice with it. patches 01-09 2) add some needed infrastructure to the network code patches 10-12 3) implement the idea outlined above patches 13-19 4) teach the swap machinery to use generic address_spaces patches 20-23 5) implement swap over NFS using all the new stuff patches 24-29 -- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
