Locking kdecore into memory

subbukk subbukk at gmail.com
Mon Jan 22 07:31:38 GMT 2007


On Monday 22 January 2007 05:31, Stefan Teleman wrote:
> On Sunday 21 January 2007 17:25, Richard Moore wrote:
> > On 1/21/07, Lubos Lunak <l.lunak at suse.cz> wrote:
> >
> > So we have some sort of kdeinit like process that runs setuid and
> > calls mlockall()? That would be able to lock the libraries into ram
> > I guess. To be useful though, how much would we have to lock?
> > kdecore, kdelibs, qt, X11 and libc I guess. That's quite a bit.
>
> A lot. :-)
True. Pinning all of kdecore into RAM is an overkill as many of its pages 
may be used rarely or not at all. If a page is frequently used, the OS 
will leave it in RAM page frame anyway. If it does get paged out, there 
isnt sufficient RAM for all active jobs. In such a case. I would rather 
boost my compile speed by shutting down X and background services than 
keep my K* apps up. Why should KDE (or any other user app) be allowed to 
pin down scarce page frames unconditionally?

I don't think the case for overriding the vm paging logic is sufficiently 
strong. It goes against the Separation of Concerns Principle in design. 
If Linux OOM logic is weak, it would be better to get it fixed than to 
have KDE work guess around it.

Subbu




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