From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from neon.transmeta.com (neon-best.transmeta.com [206.184.214.10]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA08408 for ; Fri, 27 Mar 1998 12:31:50 -0500 Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 09:30:40 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: new allocation algorithm In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Rik van Riel Cc: "Stephen C. Tweedie" , linux-mm List-ID: On Fri, 27 Mar 1998, Rik van Riel wrote: > > I just came up with the idea of using an ext2 like algorithm > for memory allocation, in which we: > - group memory in 128 PAGE groups > - have one unsigned char counter per group, counting the number > of used pages Let's wait with how well the current setup works. It seems to perform reasonably well even on smaller machines (modulo your patch), and I think we'd better more-or-less freeze it waiting for further info on what people actually think. The current scheme is fairly efficient and extremely stable, and gives good behaviour for the cases we _really_ care about (pageorders 0, 1 and to some degree 2). It comes reasonably close to working for the higher orders too, but they really aren't as critical.. Linus