Re: [00/17] Large Blocksize Support V3

William Lee Irwin III
2007-04-28T03:16:43Z

William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> What sort of strategy do you intend to use to speculatively populate
>> the pagecache with contiguous pages?

On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 12:50:26PM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> Andrew outlined it.

I'd like to suggest a few straightforward additions to the proposal:

(1) the interface to the page allocator tries to allocate N pages where
(a) N is a power of 2
(b) some effort is made to get contiguity
(c) some effort is made to fall back to lesser contiguity
(d) some effort is made to get N pages even with no contiguity
(2) a corresponding group freeing interface to the page allocator
(3) Pass the pages around in a list or similar so that O(1) instead of
O(pages) splice operations under the lock suffice for passing
them around. Dissecting compound pages outside locks helps.

-- wli