Re: [PATCH 3/4] Embed zone_id information within the zonelist->zones pointer

Christoph Lameter
2007-08-13T22:00:14Z

On Tue, 14 Aug 2007, Andi Kleen wrote:

> > > The DMA zone will be still there, but only reachable with special functions.
> >
> > Not too happy with that one but this is going the right direcrtion.
> >
> > On NUMA this would still mean allocating space for the DMA zone on all
> > nodes although we only need this on node 0.
>
> The DMA allocator is NUMA unaware. This means it doesn't require multiple
> dma zones per node, but is happy with a global one that can live somewhere
> else outside the pgdat. I also removed PCP and other fanciness so it's
> really quite independent and much simpler than the normal one. It also
> doesn't need try_to_free_pages() because in a isolated zone there
> shouldn't be any freeable pages.

You said that ZONE_DMA will still be there right? So the zone will be
replicated over all nodes but remain unused except for node 0.

> There are still other architectures that use it. Biggest offender
> is s390. I'll leave them to their respective maintainers.

IA64 also uses ZONE_DMA to support 32bit controllers.

So I think we can only get rid of ZONE_DMA in its 16MB incarnation for
i386 and x86_64.

But you will be keeping ZONE_DMA32?

If so then it may be better to drop ZONE_DMA32 and make ZONE_DMA be below
4GB like other 64bit arches.