Re: __vmalloc and alloc_page

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 01:26:11PM -0300, Leandro Motta Barros wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback on the previous email. Well, there is another
> thing we thought that could be done. '__vmalloc()' allocates its
> memory by calling 'alloc_page()' for every necessary page. Wouldn't
> it be better calling 'alloc_pages()' to allocate more pages at once
> whenever possible? We would need more bookeepping, and sometimes it
> could be necessary to actually allocate the memory page per page, but
> we think this approach could be a way to use memory blocks of higher order.
> Do you think this is feasible or useful?
> Also, we would like to know if you have suggestions on topics that we could 
> explore and implement.

Higher-order would probably not be as useful as you'd suspect; try
looking at the distribution of available pages of given sizes in /proc/.
OTOH, just being able to get more than one page in one call (not relying
on physically contiguous memory) would be a simple and useful optimization.


-- wli
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