From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Daniel Phillips Subject: Re: [PATCH 04/29] mm: kmem_estimate_pages() Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:05:38 -0800 Message-ID: <200712141405.38577.phillips@phunq.net> References: <20071214153907.770251000@chello.nl> <20071214154439.489413000@chello.nl> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Linus Torvalds , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org, trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no To: Peter Zijlstra Return-path: Received: from phunq.net ([64.81.85.152]:56547 "EHLO moonbase.phunq.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753577AbXLNWFr (ORCPT ); Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:05:47 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20071214154439.489413000@chello.nl> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Friday 14 December 2007 07:39, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > Provide a method to get the upper bound on the pages needed to > allocate a given number of objects from a given kmem_cache. > > This lays the foundation for a generic reserve framework as presented > in a later patch in this series. This framework needs to convert > object demand (kmalloc() bytes, kmem_cache_alloc() objects) to pages. And hence the big idea that all reserve accounting can be done in units of pages, allowing the use of a single global reserve that already exists. The other big idea here is that reserve accounting can be independent of the actual resource allocations. This is a powerful idea which we may not have explained clearly yet. Daniel