From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2005 23:26:49 -0800 From: Paul Jackson Subject: Re: [Lhms-devel] [PATCH 0/7] Fragmentation Avoidance V19 Message-Id: <20051103232649.12e58615.pj@sgi.com> In-Reply-To: <20051104063820.GA19505@elte.hu> References: <20051104010021.4180A184531@thermo.lanl.gov> <20051103221037.33ae0f53.pj@sgi.com> <20051104063820.GA19505@elte.hu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Ingo Molnar Cc: torvalds@osdl.org, andy@thermo.lanl.gov, mbligh@mbligh.org, akpm@osdl.org, arjan@infradead.org, arjanv@infradead.org, haveblue@us.ibm.com, kravetz@us.ibm.com, lhms-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, mel@csn.ul.ie, nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au List-ID: Ingo wrote: > to clearly stress the 'might easily fail' restriction. But if userspace > is well-behaved on Andy's systems (which it seems to be), then in > practice it should be resizable. At first glance, this is the sticky point that jumps out at me. Andy wrote: > My experience is that after some days or weeks of running have gone > by, there is no possible way short of a reboot to get pages merged > effectively back to any pristine state with the infrastructure that > exists there. I take it, from what Andy writes, and from my other experience with similar customers, that his workload is not "well-behaved" in the sense you hoped for. After several diverse jobs are run, we cannot, so far as I know, merge small pages back to big pages. I have not played with Mel Gorman's Fragmentation Avoidance patches, so don't know if they would provide a substantial improvement here. They well might. -- I won't rest till it's the best ... Programmer, Linux Scalability Paul Jackson 1.925.600.0401 -- 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: email@kvack.org