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    SubjectRe: 2.2.0-final
    On Wed, Jan 20, 1999 at 11:10:42PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

    Hello.

    I was hoping that this issue resolves itself before 2.2.0 (with Andrea
    Arcangeli's work), but it has not.

    Problem: On small memory systems, the cache is too aggressive, swapping out
    process memory, exchanging it with a lot of cache memory, for no good reason.
    This causes obvious problems of processes being swapped out from beneath the
    user (needlessly), which produces extremely bad performance and
    interactivity compared to previous kernels (before pagecache and buffermem
    limits were maimed).

    A short term solution would be to put pagecache and buffermem limits back,
    at least for those users who wish to have them (and maybe enable them by
    default on small memory machines, as the defaults were before). I have no
    idea how complicated this might be with the MM changes, though.
    A long term solution would be to fix this, somehow, which is what Andrea
    Arcangeli has been trying to do recently (his work improved things quite a
    bit, but it is still worse than before).

    Is it a good idea to 'release' 2.2.0 with such a problem? Linux is generally
    known for being usable on low-end machines. Right now - it lacks in that
    respect.

    > "Is this something that normal people would ever really care deeply
    > about?"

    Probably, if there are people other than me that are still using systems
    with 16mb of physical RAM. There probably are some. Maybe.

    Nimrod

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