Re: [PATCH v4] drivers/base/memory.c: cache blocks in radix tree to accelerate lookup

Don Dutile
2020-01-16T17:20:46Z

On 1/16/20 10:28 AM, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 16.01.20 16:22, Michal Hocko wrote:
>> On Wed 15-01-20 20:09:48, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>> On 09.01.20 22:25, Scott Cheloha wrote:
>>>> Searching for a particular memory block by id is an O(n) operation
>>>> because each memory block's underlying device is kept in an unsorted
>>>> linked list on the subsystem bus.
>>>>
>>>> We can cut the lookup cost to O(log n) if we cache the memory blocks in
>>>> a radix tree. With a radix tree cache in place both memory subsystem
>>>> initialization and memory hotplug run palpably faster on systems with a
>>>> large number of memory blocks.
>>>>
>>>> Signed-off-by: Scott Cheloha <cheloha@linux.ibm.com>
>>>> Acked-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
>>>> Acked-by: Nathan Lynch <nathanl@linux.ibm.com>
>>>> Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
>>>
>>> Soooo,
>>>
>>> I just learned that radix trees are nowadays only a wrapper for xarray
>>> (for quite a while already!), and that the xarray interface shall be
>>> used in new code.
>>
>> Good point. I somehow didn't realize this would add more work for a
>> later code refactoring. The mapping should be pretty straightforward.
>
> Yes it is. @Scott, care to send a fixup that does the mapping?
>
>>
>> Thanks for noticing!
>
> Don noticed it, so thanks to him :)
>
Backporting XArray to RHEL-8, and continuing to support radix-tree api in RHEL-8 due to RHEL rulz, it wasn't stable/bug-free everyewhere, etc., was a challenge, thus my 'sensitivity' to seeing new radix-tree code upstream.

>