From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([140.186.70.92]:33589) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RSJOu-00043t-MS for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:14:29 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RSJOt-0002iz-KS for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:14:28 -0500 Received: from mail-gx0-f173.google.com ([209.85.161.173]:40761) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RSJOt-0002iu-I1 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:14:27 -0500 Received: by ggnb1 with SMTP id b1so852428ggn.4 for ; Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:14:26 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: From: Mulyadi Santosa Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:13:45 +0700 Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu & kernel :address generated are non-uniform List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: sparsh mittal Cc: qemu-devel@nongnu.org On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 21:49, sparsh mittal wrote: > GBrange numberOfAddresses > > 0-0.5---> 3325 > > 0.5-1---> 1253 > > 1-1.5---> 0 > > 1.5-2---> 30 > > 2-2.5---> 0 > > 2.5-3---> 1708 > > 3-3.5---> 10521 > > 3.5-4---> 0 > > 4-4.5--> 15428 Hi... I never observe the above address usage like you did, but I think that is expected. The reason is that Linux kernel tends to allocate from high memory (above 896 MiB ) to allocate pages, including their page tables. This is done to lower the "pressure" against normal memory zone. Now for the "unbalance" case, I guess that's due the high usage of slab. I am not sure where in fact they are started to be placed in RAM. One thing for sure is that they act as cache for frequest used objects such task structs, bio, socket buffers. So, as you can take a guess. It's a mechanism in Linux memory management which is quite complicated. Not sure if there's shortcut to shape this up. -- regards, Mulyadi Santosa Freelance Linux trainer and consultant blog: the-hydra.blogspot.com training: mulyaditraining.blogspot.com