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

Christoph Lameter
2007-03-16T20:52:22Z

On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, David Miller wrote:

> > 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.
>
> If you set the bit range small enough and don't use sparsemem-extreme,
> the cost is extremely low considering the flexibility you obtain.

What flexibility?

> There are always going to be holes on large systems, there isn't
> really a way to avoid this given how addressing is done on those
> machines.

Virtual mmap allows holes in the same way as page tables do. These
structures were designed for sparseness. I really do not think we should
rediscuss the material here that was discussed on linux-mm. The outcome of
that was that we will introduce virtual memmap to reduce sparsemem
overhead and to increase flexibility.