Re: 2.4: why is NR_GFPINDEX so large?

Timur Tabi
2000-06-21T20:41:04Z

** Reply to message from Kanoj Sarcar <kanoj@google.engr.sgi.com> on Wed, 21
Jun 2000 13:37:14 -0700 (PDT)

> Even though there is unused space, that might be padding out certain
> data structures to cache line aligned sizes, causing lesser cache
> line eviction etc, at the cost of few more bytes of unused space. On
> certain applications, this can cause a noticeable improvement.

Oh, that has to do with this comment in mmzone.h:

* Right now a zonelist takes up less than a cacheline. We never
* modify it apart from boot-up, and only a few indices are used,
* so despite the zonelist table being relatively big, the cache
* footprint of this construct is very small.

But isn't that talking about the individual zonelist_t structures, not the
entire node_zonelists array? I mean, we're talking about 224 UNUSED array
elements, which is much bigger than any cache line. And since the stuff is
never used, it's never cached either.

--
Timur Tabi - ttabi@interactivesi.com
Interactive Silicon - http://www.interactivesi.com

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