1. The pageout daemon used to block under certain
circumstances, and we needed to add new functionality
that would cause the pageout daemon to block more often.
Now, the pageout daemon mostly just gets rid of pages
and kills processes when the system is out of swap.
The swapping, rss limiting and object cache trimming
have been folded into a new daemon called "vmdaemon".
This new daemon does things that need to be done for
the VM system, but can block. For example, if the
vmdaemon blocks for memory, the pageout daemon
can take care of it. If the pageout daemon had
blocked for memory, it was difficult to handle
the situation correctly (and in some cases, was
impossible).
2. The collapse problem has now been entirely fixed.
It now appears to be impossible to accumulate unnecessary
vm objects. The object collapsing now occurs when ref counts
drop to one (where it is more likely to be more simple anyway
because less pages would be out on disk.) The original
fixes were incomplete in that pathological circumstances
could still be contrived to cause uncontrolled growth
of swap. Also, the old code still, under steady state
conditions, used more swap space than necessary. When
using the new code, users will generally notice a
significant decrease in swap space usage, and theoretically,
the system should be leaving fewer unused pages around
competing for memory.
Submitted by: John Dyson
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