GitLab

Patch series "Introduce MADV_COLD and MADV_PAGEOUT", v7.

- Background

The Android terminology used for forking a new process and starting an app
from scratch is a cold start, while resuming an existing app is a hot
start.  While we continually try to improve the performance of cold
starts, hot starts will always be significantly less power hungry as well
as faster so we are trying to make hot start more likely than cold start.

To increase hot start, Android userspace manages the order that apps
should be killed in a process called ActivityManagerService.
ActivityManagerService tracks every Android app or service that the user
could be interacting with at any time and translates that into a ranked
list for lmkd(low memory killer daemon).  They are likely to be killed by
lmkd if the system has to reclaim memory.  In that sense they are similar
to entries in any other cache.  Those apps are kept alive for
opportunistic performance improvements but those performance improvements
wil...