SUSE Labs Conference 2020 - Overview of memory reclaim in current upstream kernel
Channel: SUSE Labs
Date: 2020-10-06

Conference held using the awesome #bigbluebutton !

"Everybody knows" that memory reclaim uses LRU lists to decide which pages to evict to free memory for new pages. Some people know that there are separate lists for file (page cache) and anonymous pages, and that both are split in active and inactive parts. There are however lots of subtle details of how these four lists' sizes are balanced, and things also changed recently with e.g. addition of refault tracking. The talk will be based on my own attempt to understand the current upstream implementation and how both individual decisions during the process and workloads specifics affect the balancing.