Kernel Threads

Kernel Threads

The last component in the VM subsystem are the kernel threads: kscand, kswapd, kupdated, and bdflush. These tasks are responsible for the recovery and management of in use memory. All pages of memory have an associated state (for more information on the memory state machine, refer to the section called “The Life of a Page” section. In general, the active tasks in the kernel related to VM usage are responsible for attempting to move pages out of RAM. Periodically they examine RAM, trying to identify and free inactive memory so that it can be put to other uses in the system.

The Life of a Page

All of the memory managed by the VM is labeled by a state. These states help let the VM know what to do with a given page under various circumstances. Dependent on the current needs of the system, the VM may transfer pages from one state to the next, according to the state machine in Figure 2. “VM Page State Machine”. Using these states, the VM can determine what is being done with a page by the system at a given time and what actions the VM may take on the page. The states that have particular meanings are as follows:

1. FREE — All pages available for allocation begin in this state. This indicates to the VM that the page is not being used for any purpose and is available for allocation.

2. ACTIVE — Pages which have been allocated from the Buddy Allocator enter this state. It indicates to the VM that the page has been allocated and is actively in use by the kernel or a user process.

3. INACTIVE DIRTY — This state indicates that the page has fallen into disuse by the entity which allocated it and thus is a candidate for removal from main memory. The kscand task periodically sweeps through all the pages in memory, taking note of the amount of time the page has been in memory since it was last accessed. If kscand finds that a page has been accessed since it last visited the page, it increments the page's age counter; otherwise, it decrements that counter. If kscand finds a page with its age counter at zero, it moves the page to the inactive dirty state. Pages in the inactive dirty state are kept in a list of pages to be laundered.

4. INACTIVE LAUNDERED — This is an interim state in which those pages which have been selected for removal from main memory enter while their contents are being moved to disk. Only pages which were in the inactive dirty state can enter this state. When the disk I/O operation is complete, the page is moved to the inactive clean state, where it may be deallocated or overwritten for another purpose. If, during the disk operation, the page is accessed, the page is moved back into the active state.

5. INACTIVE CLEAN — Pages in this state have been laundered. This means that the contents of the page are in sync with the backed up data on disk. Thus, they may be deallocated by the VM or overwritten for other purposes.