There's one example ... we can probably work around it if we try hard
enough. However, the fundamental question becomes "do we support higher
order allocs, or not?". If not fine ... but we ought to quit pretending
we do. If so, then we need to make them more reliable.
Yeah more or less. But with the fragmentation patch, it by
no means becomes an exact science ;) I wouldn't have thought
it would make it hugely easier to free an order 2 or 3 area
memory block on a loaded machine.
Ummm. so the blunderbuss is an exact science? ;-) At least it fairly
consistently doesn't work, I suppose ;-) ;-)
Why not just have kernel allocations going from the bottom
up, and user allocations going from the top down. That would
get you most of the way there, wouldn't it? (disclaimer: I
could well be talking shit here).
Not sure it's quite that simple, though I haven't looked in detail
at these patches. My point was merely that we need to do *something*.
Off the top of my head ... what happens when kernel meets user in
the middle. where do we free and allocate from now ? ;-) Once we've
been up for a while, mem is nearly all used, nearly all of the time.
Is a good discussion to have though ;-)