[Lustre-discuss] Swap over lustre

[David Dillow]

On Wed, 2011-08-17 at 22:57 -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
> The lustre client (and most NFS or even network block devices) all do 
> memory allocation of buffers ... which is anathema to migrating pages 
> out to disk.  You can easily wind up in a "death spiral" race condition 
> (and it sounds like you are there).  You might be able to do something 
> with iSCSI or SRP (though these also do block allocations and could 
> trigger death spirals).

Your post is generally correct, but minor nit here: there is no memory
allocation on the command path of the Linux SRP initiator, so the death
spiral is not possible there. I suspect the iSCSI initiator takes
similar precautions -- or uses mempools -- to avoid this fate, but I'm
not as familiar with that code.

Cheers,
Dave