Re: Page Colouring (was: 2.6.0 Huge pages not working as expected)

William Lee Irwin III
2003-12-29T06:53:00Z

On Sun, Dec 28, 2003 at 08:09:17PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I didn't see the patch itself, but I spent some time talking to Daniel
> after your talk at the kernel summit. At least I _think_ it was him I was
> talking to - my memory for names and faces is basically zero.
> Daniel claimed to have it working back then, and that it actually shrank
> the kernel source code. The basic approach is to just make PAGE_SIZE
> larger, and handle temporary needs for smaller subpages by just
> dynamically allocating "struct page" entries for them. The size reduction
> came from getting rid of the "struct buffer_head", because it ends up
> being just another "small page".
> Daniel, details?

I also heard something about this from daniel. The description I was
given implied rather different functionality, and raised rather serious
questions about the implementation he didn't have adequate answers for.
I also never saw code, despite months of occasional discussions about it.

I did get a positive reaction from you at KS, and I've also been
slaving away at keeping this thing current and improving it when I can
for a year. Would you mind telling me what the Hell is going on here?

I guess I already know I'm screwed beyond all hope of recovery, but I
might as well get official confirmation.

-- wli