ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Oliver Grawert <ogra@xxxxxxxxxx>]

hi,

Am Donnerstag, den 31.07.2014, 18:10 +0200 schrieb Christian Dywan:

> > additionally to this, while we need to have a swap file/partition
> > available to make the kernel behave better in case of memory management,
> > we do not actually want to *use* that swap space ... recently ricardo
> > already landed a change that reduced the size of the swap file to 32M (i
> > would like to see us to actually go a lot lower, i.e. the minimum
> > allowed size since we just waste diskspace with that) 
> >
> > to make sure the swap space does not get used I added a "vm.swappiness"
> > setting of 0 via the newly shipped /etc/sysctl.d/60-swappiness.conf
> > file.
> Out of curiosity on my part, in what way is a tiny swap file that never
> gets used useful to the kernel?

kernel memory handling is completely different with or without swap, on
request of the kernel team we need swap enabled to make overcommit and
the OOM-killer work as expected (which i.e. our app lifecycle model
depends on) , seemingly just enabling swap (weather or not you use it
seems to not matter) will enable a different code path in the kernel for
memory management.

ciao
	oli

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