Page Replacement in Linux 2.4 Memory Management

While the virtual memory management in Linux 2.2 has decent performance for many workloads, it suffers from a number of problems. The first part of this paper contains a description of how the Linux 2.2 VMM works and an analysis of why it has bad behaviour in some situations. The way in which a lot of this behaviour has been fixed in the Linux 2.4 kernel is described in the second part of the paper. Due to Linux 2.4 being in a code freeze period while these improvements were implemented, only known-good solutions have been integrated. A lot of the ideas used are derived from principles used in other operating systems, mostly because we have certainty that they work and a good understanding of why, making them suitable for integration into the Linux codebase during a code freeze. 1 Linux 2.2 memory management The memory management in the Linux 2.2 kernel seems to be focussed on simplicity and low overhead. While this works pretty well in practice for most systems, it has some weak poin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: USENIX
• Authors: Rik van Riel
• Keywords: Linux, Linux 2.2 Vmm, Memory Management, Operating System, USENIX 2001