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What are the VM motivations??

DISCUSSION Colonel 3 participants 3 messages Jun 24, 2001 1 message not in the archive

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Colonel

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#1 lore raw
Quoted 10 lines · you
Quoted 6 lines · Jason McMullan

One we know how we would 'train' our little VM critter, we
will know how to measure its performance. Once we have measures, we can have good benchmarks. Once we have good benchmarks - we can pick a good VM alg.

Or heck, let's just make the VM a _real_ Neural Network, that

Quoted 8 lines

OK. I challenge you to come up with:

1) the set of inputs for the neural network
2) the set of outputs
3) the goal for training the thing

I'm pretty fed up with people who want to "change the VM" but never give any details of their ideas.

It's simple. I want the old reliable behavior back, the one I found in kernels from 1.1.41 thru 2.2.14. The behavior that I have enjoyed for 7 years, the one that allows me to chuckle when listening to windoze user's expressing their woes. Not the one that kills important processes because of some fantasy AI, not the one that locks up the machine. The one that lets me run an unattended machine for months rather than barely make it thru a week.

What you hear now is nothing compared to the roar that will occur shortly (as the distributions start releasing 2.4 versions) when the masses encounter the current surprises. They will not be able to say in detail how to change the VM, other than the above. We want to USE linux and depend upon it, not become VM gurus to fix our kernels.

Signature · 7 lines
"Or heck, let's just make the VM a _real_ Neural Network, that self
trains itself to the load you put on the system. Hideously complex and
evil?  Well, why not wire up that roach on the floor, eating that stale
cheese doodle. It can't do any worse job on VM that some of the VM
patches I've seen..."  -- Jason McMullan

ditto
#2 lore raw
Quoted 2 lines · Colonel

It's simple. I want the old reliable behavior back, the one I found in kernels from 1.1.41 thru 2.2.14.

And which one would that be ? Note that there have been
4 different VM subsystems in that time and the kernel has made the transition from the buffer cache to the page cache in that period.

Please make up your mind before making feature requests ;)

regards,

Rik
--
Virtual memory is like a game you can't win; However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...

http://www.surriel.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com/

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#3 lore raw
In reply to Colonel
Quoted 9 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 2 lines · Colonel

It's simple. I want the old reliable behavior back, the one I found in kernels from 1.1.41 thru 2.2.14.

And which one would that be ? Note that there have been
4 different VM subsystems in that time and the kernel has made the transition from the buffer cache to the page cache in that period.

I'd say, what he tries to tell you is that he does not (and I don't for this point, either) care, which one it is or how it is implemented or whether you're using a page, buffer or crispy chips cache, as long as the bugger works, does not lock up, does not lose memory and does not kill innocent processes. If you need a roach to wire to the computer to do it, fine, tell me how to wire it and I'll start lobbying mainboard suppliers to provide six pin sockets for roach plugging.

Just as all VMs up to 2.2.19 do (with a few notable exceptions around the 2.2.14-2.2.16 range). These VM problems are my biggest stop sign to move my production boxes to 2.4.x. My 2.2.x boxes have uptimes in the hundreds of days, my 2.0.x boxes do, too:

henning@db1 21:05 ~ > uptime
9:05pm up 410 days, 17:12, 1 user, load average: 0.15, 0.03, 0.01
henning@db1 21:05 ~ > uname -an
Linux db1 2.0.37 #1 Sat Mar 13 19:41:01 MET 1999 i686 unknown

(Heck if that USV in front of the Cobalt Qube wouldn't have died, I'd have another 440+ days uptime to boast with.)

That's the stability most of us want to see in the _stable_ kernel series. And I fully agree with the fact that I don't want to become a VM kernel expert just to run the bugger. =:-)

Some of us like Linux not because it's free but because it's rock solid. Because some of us use them to run our businesses on it. If I want uptimes in the days range, I'd use Win2k and hire a monkey to administrate the box, because it has a nice GUI (TM).

Regards
Henning

Signature · 5 lines
Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen       -- Geschaeftsfuehrer
INTERMETA - Gesellschaft fuer Mehrwertdienste mbH     [email protected]

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