Re: [patch 00/14] Page cache cleanup in anticipation of Large Blocksize support

Arjan van de Ven
2007-06-18T03:03:07Z

On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 19:08 -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Jun 2007, Matt Mackall wrote:
>
> > Is it? Last I looked it had reverted to handing out reverse-contiguous
> > pages.
>
> I thought that was fixed? Bill Irwin was working on it.
>
> But the contiguous pages usually only work shortly after boot. After
> awhile memory gets sufficiently scrambled that the coalescing in the I/O
> layer becomes ineffective.

the buddy allocator at least defragments itself somewhat (granted, it's
not perfect and the per cpu page queues spoil the game too...)

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