From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Howells In-Reply-To: <20070518040854.GA15654@wotan.suse.de> References: <20070518040854.GA15654@wotan.suse.de> Subject: Re: [rfc] increase struct page size?! Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 10:42:30 +0100 Message-ID: <7554.1179481350@redhat.com> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Nick Piggin Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List , Linux Memory Management List , linux-arch@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Nick Piggin wrote: > I'd like to be the first to propose an increase to the size of struct page > just for the sake of increasing it! Heh. I'm surprised you haven't got more adverse reactions. > If we add 8 bytes to struct page on 64-bit machines, it becomes 64 bytes, > which is quite a nice number for cache purposes. Whilst that's true, if you have to deal with a run of contiguous page structs (eg: the page allocator, perhaps) it's actually less efficient because it takes more cache to do it. But, hey, it's a compromise whatever. In the scheme of things, if we're mostly dealing with individual page structs (as I think we are), then yes, I think it's probably a good thing to do - especially with larger page sizes. > However we don't have to let those 8 bytes go to waste: we can use them > to store the virtual address of the page, which kind of makes sense for > 64-bit, because they can likely to use complicated memory models. That's a good idea, one that's implemented on some platforms anyway. It'll be especially good with NUMA, I suspect. > I'd say all up this is going to decrease overall cache footprint in > fastpaths, both by reducing text and data footprint of page_address and > related operations, and by reducing cacheline footprint of most batched > operations on struct pages. kmap, filling in scatter/gather lists, crypto stuff. I like it. Can you do this just by turning on WANT_PAGE_VIRTUAL on all 64-bit platforms? David -- 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