Re: free bootmem feedback patch

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

At some point in the past, someone wrote:
>> Freeing boot memory... done
>> It prints more dots every x nodes handled based on the total number of 
>> nodes, in such a way that the line never exceeds 80 chars. This way it is 
>> possible to see progress being made. I have tested this on a few machines, 
>> including a 512p/512GB machine, and it works fine.

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 10:44:31AM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> Better would be probably to speed this up.
> I bet most of the overhead comes from taking locks in free_pages.
> How about adding a lockless ____free_pages and using that? 
> Adding an more optimized path for this is also not out of the question.
> Another way would be to increase the bootmem page size, but
> this won't cut down the overhead of free_pages.

That also sounds like an excellent idea.


-- wli