Re: [PATCH 20/20] Get rid of the concept of hot/cold page freeing

Mel Gorman
2009-03-03T13:53:14Z

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 10:40:17AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Feb 2009, Nick Piggin wrote:
>
> > > I hope we can get rid of various ugly elements of the quicklists if the
> > > page allocator would offer some sort of support. I would think that the
> >
> > Only if it provides significant advantages over existing quicklists or
> > adds *no* extra overhead to the page allocator common cases. :)
>
> And only if the page allocator gets fast enough to be usable for
> allocs instead of quicklists.
>

It appears the x86 doesn't even use the quicklists. I know patches for
i386 support used to exist, what happened with them?

That aside, I think we could win slightly by just knowing when a page is
zeroed and being freed back to the allocator such as when the quicklists
are being drained. I wrote a patch along those lines but it started
getting really messy on x86 so I'm postponing it for the moment.

--
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab