Re: [PATCH 1/1] hugetlbfs: handle pages higher order than MAX_ORDER

Christoph Lameter
2008-10-08T16:17:59Z

Andy Whitcroft wrote:
> When working with hugepages, hugetlbfs assumes that those hugepages
> are smaller than MAX_ORDER. Specifically it assumes that the mem_map
> is contigious and uses that to optimise access to the elements of the
> mem_map that represent the hugepage. Gigantic pages (such as 16GB pages
> on powerpc) by definition are of greater order than MAX_ORDER (larger
> than MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES in size). This means that we can no longer make
> use of the buddy alloctor guarentees for the contiguity of the mem_map,
> which ensures that the mem_map is at least contigious for maximmally
> aligned areas of MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES pages.

But the memmap is contiguous in most cases. FLATMEM, VMEMMAP etc. Its only
some special sparsemem configurations that couldhave the issue because they
break up the vmemmap. x86_64 uses VMEMMAP by default. Is this for i386?