Re: About the free page pool

William Lee Irwin III
2002-09-03T05:12:04Z

On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 06:11:17PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Note that the kernel statically allocates about 10M when it boots. This
> is basically a bug, and fixing it is a matter of running around shouting
> at people. This will happen ;) This is the low-hanging fruit.

Are you referring to boot-time allocations using get_free_pages()
instead of bootmem? Killing those off would be nice, yes. It limits
the size of some hash tables on larger machines where "proportional
to memory" means "bigger than MAX_ORDER". (Changing the algorithms to
not use gargantuan hash tables might also be an interesting exercise
but one I've not got the bandwidth to take on.)

Cheers,
Bill