From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 12:32:02 -0700 From: William Lee Irwin III Subject: Re: __vmalloc and alloc_page Message-ID: <20030917193202.GG14079@holomorphy.com> References: <200309171326.11848.lmb@exatas.unisinos.br> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <200309171326.11848.lmb@exatas.unisinos.br> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Leandro Motta Barros Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, sisopiii-l@cscience.org List-ID: 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 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: aart@kvack.org