hi,

> > following patch is to make vnodes freeable.
> > i.e. you can decrease kern.maxvnodes.

> 1) Why do we need the new lists in struct namecache? (I'm not saying
> there isn't a reason, I'm saying I don't see it :-) Freeing a vnode is the
> exact same thing to the namecache as revoking it, which we do now. So why
> do we need these new lists?

because, after we free a vnode, a pointer to the vnode held by namecache
becomes invalid.  besides, i'd like to free stale namacaches soon as well as
vnodes themselves.

> 2) This patch won't do what I'd expect. If I reduce the number of vnodes,
> I'd expect to get memory freed up. That won't really happen here. Yes, you
> call pool_free(), but it won't free pages until the whole page is free.
> i.e. until pool_free() has been called on all the vnodes in a given page.

you mean pool_put()?

> Granted, if you lower the number of vnodes enough, you will get some freed
> pages.

i think it's enough.

> To really make it work right, we need to more-heavily poolify the vnode
> free list. I'm not sure, though, if we can get the correct semantics (we
> need to preserve the free list).

what do you mean "heavily poolify"?
do you mean, some mechanisms to reclaim pool items on the same page preferably?
it might be good, but sounds like another story.

YAMAMOTO Takashi