Re: 2.4.20pre5aa2

[Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>]

Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
 > On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 09:03:41AM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
 >
 >>+	vmi = get_vmalloc_info();
 >
 > hmm, not sure if it's better to slowdown vmalloc instead of
 > /proc/meminfo and to keep meminfo o1. In theory vmalloc should be used
 > only for persistent infrequent allocations, so meminfo has a chance to
 > be recalled more frequently with monitors like xosview during workloads.
 > Admittedly in final production with no monitoring meminfo is going to
 > never be recalled, however I like the idea to keep meminfo very quick.

When I first set out to do it, I modified vmalloc.  But, I decided that it would
probably be easier to get a patch in that didn't modify vmalloc itself.  The
used calculation is much easier (used += requested_size), but the largest free
chunk gets harder to do.  I think that this would have required vfree to get
into the game as well.  It seemed much easier to just make meminfo do a little
more work.

-- 
Dave Hansen
haveblue@us.ibm.com