On Thu, 26 Apr 2007, Nick Piggin wrote: > Yeah. IMO anti-fragmentation and defragmentation is the hack, and we > should stay away from higher order allocations whenever possible.
Right and we need to create series of other approaches that we then label "non-hack" to replace it. > Hardware is built to handle many small pages efficintly, and I don't > understand how it could be an SGI-only issue. Sure, you may have an > order of magnitude or more memory than anyone else, but even my lowly > desktop _already_ has orders of magnitude more pages than it has TLB > entries or cache -- if a workload is cache-nice for me, it probably > will be on a 1TB machine as well, and if it is bad for the 1TB machine, > it is also bad on mine. There have been numbers of people that have argued the same point. Just because we have developed a way of thinking to defend our traditional 4k values does not make them right. > If this is instead an issue of io path or reclaim efficiency, then it > would be really nice to see numbers... but I don't think making these > fundamental paths more complex and slower is a nice way to fix it > (larger PAGE_SIZE would be, though). The code paths can stay the same. You can switch CONFIG_LARGE pages off if you do not want it and it is as it was. If you would have a look the patches: The code is significantly cleanup and easier to read. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
