Re: [PATCH] Tight check of pfn_valid on sparsemem - v4

Dave Hansen
2010-07-30T15:44:01Z

On Fri, 2010-07-30 at 07:48 -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Jul 2010, Dave Hansen wrote:
>
> > SPARSEMEM_EXTREME would be a bit different. It's a 2-level lookup.
> > You'd have 16 "section roots", each representing 256MB of address space.
> > Each time we put memory under one of those roots, we'd fill in a
> > 512-section second-level table, which is designed to always fit into one
> > page. If you start at 256MB, you won't waste all those entries.
>
> That is certain a solution to the !MMU case and it would work very much
> like a page table. If you have an MMU then the vmemmap sparsemem
> configuration can take advantage of of that to avoid the 2 level lookup.

Yup, couldn't agree more, Christoph.

It wouldn't hurt to have several them available on ARM since the
architecture is so diverse.

-- Dave