Re: [GIT PULL] scheduler fixes

Linus Torvalds
2009-05-24T18:20:04Z

On Sun, 24 May 2009, Pekka J Enberg wrote:
>
> Ingo, here's a patch that boots UMA+SMP+SLUB x86-64 kernel on qemu all
> the way to userspace. It probably breaks bunch of things for now but
> something for you to play with if you want.

Just looking at the patch (not actually trying it out in any way or
looking at some bigger context), this absolutely looks like the right
direction to go in.

Our order in init/main.c is largely totally historical, and I think it
makes tons of sense to move the memory allocation initialization up much
earlier.

In fact, it would be nice to perhaps try to move it even earlier. Now you
moved it to before the scheduler init (good!), but I do wonder if it could
be moved up to even before the setup_per_cpu_areas() etc crud.

I realize that the allocator wants to use the per-CPU area, but if we have
just the boot CPU area set up statically at that point, since it's only
the boot CPU running, maybe we could do those per-cpu area allocations
without the bootmem allocator too?

But even just getting bootmem out of the scheduler setup is a big
improvement, I think. So this patch looks very promising as is.

Did you test whether the other allocators were ok with this too?

Linus