Working-set protection for anonymous pages
Working-set protection for anonymous pages
The kernel's memory-management subsystem goes to great lengths to keep the pages that are actually in use in memory. But sometimes it gets things wrong, leading to reduced performance or, in the worst cases, flat-out thrashing. We may be about to see a significant improvement, though, thanks to a patch set from Joonsoo Kim changing how anonymous pages (those containing data not backed by files on disk) are managed. As it turns out, all that had to be done was to make use of some work that already exists in related parts of the memory-management code.