Re: [patch 3/9] mempool - Make mempools NUMA aware

Matthew Dobson
2006-01-27T00:44:59Z

Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Jan 2006, Matthew Dobson wrote:
>
>
>>That seems a bit beyond the scope of what I'd hoped for this patch series,
>>but if an approach like this is believed to be generally useful, it's
>>something I'm more than willing to work on...
>
>
> We need this for other issues as well. f.e. to establish memory allocation
> policies for the page cache, tmpfs and various other needs. Look at
> mempolicy.h which defines a subset of what we need. Currently there is no
> way to specify a policy when invoking the page allocator or slab
> allocator. The policy is implicily fetched from the current task structure
> which is not optimal.

I agree that the current, task-based policies are subobtimal. Having to
allocate and fill in even a small structure for each allocation is going to
be a tough sell, though. I suppose most allocations could get by with a
small handfull of static generic "policy structures"... This seems like it
will turn into a signifcant rework of all the kernel's allocation routines,
no small task. Certainly not something that I'd even start without
response from some other major players in the VM area... Anyone?

-Matt