[CFT] tree-based bootmem

William Lee Irwin III
2001-12-08T23:40:55Z

I've waited a week or two for bug reports to roll in from early testers
(including myself), and no reports have come in.

So now I humbly request the assistance of a larger userbase in testing
the bootmem patch.

The bootmem subsystem is used for tracking and reserving usable physical
memory during early boot. A patch such as this, which tracks extents
explicitly, was requested by several people. The patch is also intended
to improve discontiguous memory support in that subsystem.

The only user-visible effect of the patch should be to save small
amounts of memory by virtue of somewhat more accurate tracking of the
boundaries of allocated regions, on the order of 4-12KB on i386.

The patch has been tested successfully on i386, IA64, mipsel, Super-H,
ppc64, sparc64, and sparc32, when applied against 2.4.15.

The patch (against various kernel versions) is available from

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/wli/bootmem/

Those using the 2.4.15 patch will need to apply overflow-2.4.15 in
addition to bootmem-2.4.15

Thanks,
Bill