From: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
To: "Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>
Cc: Alok Mooley <rangdi@yahoo.com>,
linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>, Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: Active Memory Defragmentation: Our implementation & problems
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 20:03:49 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20040205190349.GC294@elf.ucw.cz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.53.0402041427270.2947@chaos>
Hi!
> > If this is an Intel x86 machine, it is impossible
> > > for pages
> > > to get fragmented in the first place. The hardware
> > > allows any
> > > page, from anywhere in memory, to be concatenated
> > > into linear
> > > virtual address space. Even the kernel address space
> > > is virtual.
> > > The only time you need physically-adjacent pages is
> > > if you
> > > are doing DMA that is more than a page-length at a
> > > time. The
> > > kernel keeps a bunch of those pages around for just
> > > that
> > > purpose.
> > >
> > > So, if you are making a "memory defragmenter", it is
> > > a CPU time-sink.
> > > That's all.
> >
> > What if the external fragmentation increases so much
> > that it is not possible to find a large sized block?
> > Then, is it not better to defragment rather than swap
> > or fail?
> >
> > -Alok
>
> All "blocks" are the same size, i.e., PAGE_SIZE. When RAM
> is tight the content of a page is written to the swap-file
> according to a least-recently-used protocol. This frees
> a page. Pages are allocated to a process only one page at
> a time. This prevents some hog from grabbing all the memory
> in the machine. Memory allocation and physical page allocation
> are two different things, I can malloc() a gigabyte of RAM on
> a machine. It only gets allocated when an attempt is made
> to access a page.
Alok is right. kernel needs to do kmalloc(8K) from time to time. And
notice that kernel uses 4M tables.
Pavel
--
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[Johanka's followup: and *two* hearts?]
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2004-02-05 19:03 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 35+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2004-02-03 4:46 Alok Mooley
2004-02-03 21:26 ` Dave Hansen
2004-02-03 22:26 ` Martin J. Bligh
2004-02-04 5:09 ` Alok Mooley
2004-02-04 5:24 ` Mike Fedyk
2004-02-04 5:54 ` Dave Hansen
2004-02-04 6:05 ` Martin J. Bligh
2004-02-04 6:22 ` Dave Hansen
2004-02-04 6:29 ` Martin J. Bligh
2004-02-04 6:40 ` Dave Hansen
2004-02-04 7:17 ` Martin J. Bligh
2004-02-04 8:30 ` Andrew Morton
2004-02-04 6:53 ` Doubt about statm_pgd_range patch Arunkumar
2004-02-04 6:57 ` Active Memory Defragmentation: Our implementation & problems IWAMOTO Toshihiro
2004-02-04 7:10 ` Dave Hansen
2004-02-04 7:50 ` IWAMOTO Toshihiro
2004-02-04 10:33 ` Hirokazu Takahashi
2004-02-04 18:33 ` Alok Mooley
2004-02-04 18:46 ` Dave Hansen
2004-02-04 18:54 ` Alok Mooley
2004-02-04 19:07 ` Richard B. Johnson
2004-02-04 19:18 ` Alok Mooley
2004-02-04 19:33 ` Richard B. Johnson
2004-02-05 5:07 ` Alok Mooley
2004-02-05 19:03 ` Pavel Machek [this message]
2004-02-04 19:35 ` Dave McCracken
2004-02-04 21:59 ` Timothy Miller
2004-02-04 23:24 ` Dave Hansen
2004-02-05 16:32 ` Dave McCracken
2004-02-04 19:37 ` Timothy Miller
2004-02-04 19:43 ` Dave Hansen
2004-02-04 19:59 ` Richard B. Johnson
2004-02-04 19:56 ` Dave Hansen
2004-02-05 5:19 ` Alok Mooley
2004-02-04 20:12 Mark_H_Johnson
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