Re: Page allocator: Single Zone optimizations

Andrew Morton
2006-11-02T18:52:12Z

On Wed, 1 Nov 2006 22:10:02 +0000 (GMT)
Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 1 Nov 2006 18:26:05 +0000
> > mel@skynet.ie (Mel Gorman) wrote:
> >
> >> I never really got this objection. With list-based anti-frag, the
> >> zone-balancing logic remains the same. There are patches from Andy
> >> Whitcroft that reclaims pages in contiguous blocks, but still with the same
> >> zone-ordering. It doesn't affect load balancing between zones as such.
> >
> > I do believe that lumpy-reclaim (initiated by Andy, redone and prototyped
> > by Peter, cruelly abandoned) is a perferable approach to solving the
> > fragmentation approach.
> >
>
> On it's own lumpy-reclaim or linear-reclaim were not enough to get
> MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES blocks of contiguous pages and these were of interest
> for huge pages although not necessarily of much use to memory hot-unplug.

I'm interested in lumpy-reclaim as a simple solution to the
e1000-cant-allocate-an-order-2-page problem, rather than for hugepages.

ie: a bugfix, not a feature..