Re: [Lhms-devel] [PATCH 0/7] Fragmentation Avoidance V19

Martin J. Bligh
2005-11-03T23:01:44Z

>> But pages_min is based on the zone size, not the system size. And we
>> still cap it. Maybe that's just a mistake?
>
> The per-zone watermarking is actually the "modern" and "working" approach.
>
> We didn't always do it that way. I would not be at all surprised if the
> capping was from the global watermarking days.
>
> Of course, I would _also_ not be at all surprised if it wasn't just out of
> habit. Most of the things where we try to scale things up by memory size,
> we cap for various reasons. Ie we tend to try to scale things like hash
> sizes for core data structures by memory size, but then we tend to cap
> them to "sane" versions.
>
> So quite frankly, it's entirely possible that the capping is there not
> because it _ever_ was a good idea, but just because it's what we almost
> always do ;)
>
> Mental inertia is definitely alive and well.

Ha ;-) Well thanks for the explanation. I would suggest the patch I sent
you makes some semblence of sense then ...

M.