Re: [PATCH 03/10] mm: tag reseve pages

Andrew Morton
2007-08-06T19:10:53Z

On Mon, 6 Aug 2007 20:59:26 +0200 Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> wrote:

> > precious page flag
>
> I always cringe when I hear that. It's really more than node/sparsemem
> use too many bits. If we get rid of 32bit NUMA that problem would be
> gone for the node at least because it could be moved into the mostly
> unused upper 32bit part on 64bit architectures.

Removing 32-bit NUMA is attractive - NUMAQ we can probably live without,
not sure about summit. But superh is starting to use NUMA now, due to
varying access times of various sorts of memory, and one can envisage other
embedded setups doing that.

Plus I don't think there are many flags left in the upper 32-bits. ia64
swooped in and gobbled lots of them, although it's not immediately clear
how many were consumed.

> The alternative would be to investigate again what it does to the
> kernel to just use different lookup methods for this.

That's cringeworthy too, I expect.