From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail190.messagelabs.com (mail190.messagelabs.com [216.82.249.51]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9E7FF6B01E3 for ; Sun, 11 Apr 2010 11:58:14 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2010 08:52:10 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: hugepages will matter more in the future In-Reply-To: <4BC1EE13.7080702@redhat.com> Message-ID: References: <20100410194751.GA23751@elte.hu> <4BC0DE84.3090305@redhat.com> <4BC0E2C4.8090101@redhat.com> <4BC0E556.30304@redhat.com> <4BC19663.8080001@redhat.com> <4BC19916.20100@redhat.com> <20100411110015.GA10149@elte.hu> <4BC1B034.4050302@redhat.com> <20100411115229.GB10952@elte.hu> <4BC1EE13.7080702@redhat.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Avi Kivity Cc: Ingo Molnar , Jason Garrett-Glaser , Mike Galbraith , Andrea Arcangeli , Pekka Enberg , Andrew Morton , linux-mm@kvack.org, Marcelo Tosatti , Adam Litke , Izik Eidus , Hugh Dickins , Nick Piggin , Rik van Riel , Mel Gorman , Dave Hansen , Benjamin Herrenschmidt , Mike Travis , KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki , Christoph Lameter , Chris Wright , bpicco@redhat.com, KOSAKI Motohiro , Balbir Singh , Arnd Bergmann , "Michael S. Tsirkin" , Peter Zijlstra , Johannes Weiner , Daisuke Nishimura , Arjan van de Ven List-ID: On Sun, 11 Apr 2010, Avi Kivity wrote: > > And yet Oracle and java have options to use large pages, and we know google > and HPC like 'em. Maybe they just haven't noticed the fundamental brokenness > yet. The thing is, what you are advocating is what traditional UNIX did. Prioritizing the special cases rather than the generic workloads. And I'm telling you, it's wrong. Traditional Unix is dead, and it's dead exactly _because_ it prioritized those kinds of loads. I'm perfectly happy to take specialized workloads into account, but it needs to help the _normal_ case too. Somebody mentioned 4k CPU support as an example, and that's a good example. The only reason we support 4k CPU's is that the code was made clean enough to work with them and actually help clean up the SMP code in general. I've also seen Andrea talk about how it's all rock solid. We _know_ that is wrong, because the anon_vma bug is not solved. That bug apparently happens under low-memory situations, so clearly nobody has really stressed the low-memory case. So here's the deal: make the code cleaner, and it's fine. And stop trying to sell it with _crap_. Linus -- 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