On Tue, 9 Oct 2007, Nick Piggin wrote: > > I have done some tests which indicate a couple of very basic common tools > don't do much zero-page activity (ie. kbuild). And also combined with some > logical arguments to say that a "sane" app wouldn't be using zero_page much. > (basically -- if the app cares about memory or cache footprint and is using > many pages of zeroes, then it should have a more compressed representation > of zeroes anyway).
One of the things that zero-page has been used for is absolutely *huge* (but sparse) arrays in Fortan programs. At least in traditional fortran, it was very hard to do dynamic allocations, so people would allocate the *maximum* array statically, and then not necessarily use everything. I don't know if the pages ever even got paged in, but this is the kind of usage which is *not* insane. Linus - 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/