Re: Getting big areas of memory, in 2.3.x?

Ingo Molnar
1999-12-10T00:44:53Z

On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Benjamin C.R. LaHaise wrote:

> The type of allocation determines what pool memory is allocated from.
> Ie nonpagable kernel allocations come from one zone, atomic
> allocations from another and user from yet another. It's basically
> the same thing that the slab does, except for pages. The key
> advantage is that allocations of different types are not mixed, so the
> lifetime of allocations in the same zone tends to be similar and
> fragmentation tends to be lower.

well, this is perfectly possible with the current zone allocator (check
out how build_zonelists() builds dynamic allocation paths). I dont see
much point in it though, it might prevent fragmentation to a certain
degree, but i dont think it is a fair use of memory resources. (i'm pretty
sure the atomic zone would stay unused most of the time) But you might
want to try it out - just pass many small zones in free_area_init_core()
and modify build_zonelists() to have private and isolated zones for
GFP_ATOMIC, etc.

the SLAB is completely different as it has micro-units of a few pages. A
zoned allocator must work on a larger scale, and cannot afford wasting
memory on the order of those larger units.

-- mingo