Re: CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G and 1GB RAM

[Matt Keenan <tank.en.mate@gmail.com>]

William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:26:42 +0100 "Bradley Chapman" <kakadu@gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>>> Basically, all I want to know is whether or not enabling
>>> CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G for a laptop that has exactly 1GB of RAM will result
>>> in any performance degradation.
>>>       
>
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 12:17:55AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
>   
>> I would expect the advantages of the additional 128MB to considerably
>> outweigh the cost of turning on CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G.
>> That cost will be a little extra CPU consumption inside the kernel, but the
>> great majority of CPU consumption usually happens in userspace anyway.
>>     
>
> The CONFIG_VMSPLIT config options were merged for such cases.
>
> It should be able to split on any 4MB-aligned boundary in
> CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G. CONFIG_VMSPLIT_3G_OPT appears to do something of
> this sort to use an entire 1GB RAM with minimal user address space
> reduction.
>
> This is an ELF ABI violation but the number of major applications
> that break is apparently low.
>
>   
wine and some java implementations being two of the big caveats.

Matt