Re: large page patch (fwd) (fwd)

Linus Torvalds
2002-08-03T03:28:35Z

On Fri, 2 Aug 2002, David Mosberger wrote:
>
> The Rice people avoided some of the fragmentation problems by
> pro-actively allocating a max-order physical page, even when only a
> (small) virtual page was being mapped.

This probably works ok if
- the superpages are only slightly smaller than the smaller page
- superpages are a nice optimization.

> And since superpages quickly become
> counter-productive in tight-memory situations anyhow, this seems like
> a very reasonable approach.

Ehh.. The only people who are _really_ asking for the superpages want
almost nothing _but_ superpages. They are willing to use 80% of all memory
for just superpages.

Yes, it's Oracle etc, and the whole point for these users is to avoid
having any OS memory allocation for these areas.

Linus