Re: -mmX 4G patches feedback [numbers: how much performance impact]

["Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com>]

--On Friday, April 09, 2004 01:22:15 +0200 Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 04:14:08PM -0700, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
>> Me confused. Are you saying it's worse compared to pte_highmem? or to 
>> shoving ptes in lowmem?
> 
> worse than pte_highmem if booting with mem=800m
> 
>> Ah. You're worried about the distro situation, where PTE_HIGHMEM would
>> be turned on for a non-highmem machine, right? Makes more sense I guess.
> 
> it's not just a distro situation, it's about not having to recompile the
> kernel for every machine I own, even gentoo has an option to have a
> compile server in the network that build packages and you install the
> binaries from it, so there must be some value in being able to share a
> binary on more than one machine (this is especially true for me since I
> upgrade kernel quite fast).
> 
> it's not just about non-highmem machines, on 1G/2G boxes the probability
> that pte-highmem cause you any slowdown is an order of magnitude smaller
> than on a 32G machine (where ptes should never hit lowmem or it means my
> classzone lowmem_reserve_ratio algorithms have not yet been ported to 2.6)
> with your model you'd have no way to boost when you are lucky to get a
> lowmem page.

OK, I think I understand your concern now - I was being slow ;-)
I guess there are a few more PTEs to set up on exec, you're right.
I still think it's faster than pte_highmem, which was a static config 
option anyway (so it's better in all cases than pte_highmem, when enabled)
but still not perfect. Hmm. I'll go think about it ;-)

m.