Aggressive Low Memory Booster For The Linux Kernel

Last week on the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for an Aggressive Low Memory Booster. This is potentially an interesting feature for Linux systems with limited amounts of RAM.

A developer from Samsung India, Pintu Kumar, proposed introducing an "Aggressive Low Memory Booster" feature for the Linux kernel to boost the available free memory of the system when under extreme memory pressure, which should particularly benefit embedded Linux devices with limited amounts of RAM.

The Aggressive Low Memory Booster would come into action once the available system memory falls below a certain threshold, a user-space programming passing the amount of required memory to be reclaimed, manually through a sysfs interface, using a new kernel ioctl, a new system call, or during CMA to reclaim/shrink a CMA region.

This Aggressive Low Memory Booster work comes one year after the same developer was working on shrink_all_memory from user-space.

It appears that the Samsung developer has now worked out the Aggressive Low Memory Booster feature for the Linux kernel per this mailing list message. Unfortunately though not too many more details are known at this time nor is there any patch-set / Git repository, likely just as an oversight in the original posting, given Samsung's kindness to the Linux kernel in the past and their other contributions. Hopefully more details will be learned soon about the Aggressive Low Memory Booster.