Re: [PATCH 00/18] Make common x86 arch area for i386 and x86_64 - Take 2

Christoph Lameter
2007-03-16T20:15:44Z

On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, Andi Kleen wrote:

>
> > x86_64 is going to acquire more functionality that will not be available
> > for i386. We plan f.e. to add virtual memmap support for x86_64. Virtual
>
> What advantage would that have over the current setup?
> We already should handle holes between nodes reasonably efficiently
> and with nonlinear memory even holes inside nodes shouldn't be a problem.

It is primarily a performance improvement since the sparsemem table
lookups would no longer be necessary and it also streamlines other
frequent cacheline uses. These page -> page_struct and vice versa
operations are key to the performance of various subsystem among them
the slab allocator.