Re: [RFC PATCH] greatly reduce SLOB external fragmentation

[Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>]

On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 11:24 -0800, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Matt Mackall wrote:
> 
> > One idea I've been kicking around is pushing the boundary for the buddy
> > allocator back a bit (to 64k, say) and using SL*B under that. The page
> > allocators would call into buddy for larger than 64k (rare!) and SL*B
> > otherwise. This would let us greatly improve our handling of things like
> > task structs and skbs and possibly also things like 8k stacks and jumbo
> > frames. As SL*B would never be competing with the page allocator for
> > contiguous pages (the buddy allocator's granularity would be 64k), I
> > don't think this would exacerbate the page-level fragmentation issues.
> 
> This would create another large page size (and that would have my 
> enthusiastic support).

Well, I think we'd still have the same page size, in the sense that we'd
have a struct page for every hardware page and we'd still have hardware
page-sized pages in the page cache. We'd just change how we allocated
them. Right now we've got a stack that looks like:

 buddy / page allocator
 SL*B allocator
 kmalloc

And we'd change that to:

 buddy allocator
 SL*B allocator
 page allocator / kmalloc

So get_free_page() would still hand you back a hardware page, it would
just do it through SL*B.

>  It would decrease listlock effect drastically for SLUB.

Not sure what you're referring to here.

> However, isnt this is basically confessing that the page allocator is not 
> efficient for 4k page allocations?

Well I wasn't thinking of doing this for any performance reasons. But
there certainly could be some.
-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.