Re: 2.4.19pre1aa1

[Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>]

On Mon, 4 Mar 2002 15:03:19 -0800 (PST)
Samuel Ortiz <sortiz@dbear.engr.sgi.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Mar 2002, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > yes, also make sure to keep this patch from SGI applied, it's very
> > important to avoid memory balancing if there's still free memory in the
> > other zones:
> >
> > 	ftp://ftp.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/kernels/v2.4/2.4.19pre1aa1/20_numa-mm-1
> This patch is included (in a slightly different form) in the 2.4.17
> discontig patch (http://sourceforge.net/projects/discontig).
> But martin may need another patch to apply. With the current
> implementation of __alloc_pages, we have 2 problems :
> 1) A node is not emptied before moving to the following node
> 2) If none of the zones on a node have more freepages than min(defined as
>    min+= z->pages_low), we start looking on the following node, instead of
>    trying harder on the same node.

Forgive my ignorance, but aren't these two problems completely identical in a
UP or even SMP setup? I mean what is the negative drawback in your proposed
solution, if there simply is no other node? If it is not harmful to the
"standard" setups it may as well be included in the mainline, or not?

Regards,
Stephan