Subject: Re: linux-next: build failure after merge of the akpm-current tree

From: Josh Triplett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 15:10:40 -0700

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 01:31:33PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 13:27:58 -0700 [email-masked] wrote:
> 
> > I agree with that.  I'm wondering if, rather than making the
> > SRCU-ification optional, shrinkers themselves could just be optional.
> > Unless I'm badly misunderstanding what shrinkers do, they seem like a
> > perfect example of something that could be omitted with little to no
> > impact.  (Stub them out, make them never called, and if you run out of
> > memory just be unhappy.  Ditto for the oom-killer, which really ought to
> > be optional.)
> 
> The shrinkers do important stuff ;) "find /" will consume large amounts
> of memory for inode and dentry caches.  The shrinkers are how we free
> that up again.

*Ah*, I see.  I misunderstood their purpose, and I didn't realize that
was one of the cases they covered.  While that might be possible to
reduce, it doesn't sound like it can go away entirely. :)

- Josh Triplett