Re: [00/17] Large Blocksize Support V3

Nick Piggin
2007-04-27T12:26:04Z

Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:
>
>
>>For the TLB issue, higher order pagecache doesn't help. If distros
>>ship with a 4K page size on powerpc, and use some larger pages in
>>the pagecache, some people are still going to get angry because
>>they wanted to use 64K pages... But I agree 64K pages is too big
>>for most things anyway, and 16 would be better as a default (which
>>hopefully x86-64 will get one day).
>
>
> Powerpc supports multiple pagesizes. Maybe we could make mmap use those
> page sizes some day if we had a variable order page cache. Your stands on
> the issue means that powerpc will be forever crippled and not be able to
> use its full potential.

Linus's favourite jokes about powerpc mmu being crippled forever, aside ;)

This seems like just speculation. I would not be against something which,
without, would "cripple" some relevant hardware, but you are just handwaving
at this point. And you are still ignoring the alternatives.

>>Anyway, for io performance, there are alternatives, dispite what
>>some people seem to be saying. We can submit larger sglists to the
>>device for larger ios, which Jens is looking at (which could help
>>all types of workloads, not just those with sequential large file
>>IO).
>
>
> Right this could help but it is not addressing the basic requirement for
> devices that need large contiguuos chunks of memory for I/O.

Did you read the last paragraph? Or anything Andrew's been writing?

"After that, I'd find it amusing if HBAs worth thousands of $ have
trouble looking up sglists at the relatively glacial pace that IO
requires, and/or can't spare a few more K for reasonable sglist
sizes, but if that is really the case, then we could use iommus
and/or just attempt to put physically contiguous pages in pagecache,
rather than require it."

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.