Re: [Patch 3/3] prepopulate/cache cleared pages

From: Paul Jackson
Date: Thu Feb 23 2006 - 13:23:41 EST


Just a random idea, offered with little real understanding
of what's going on ...

Instead of a per-task clear page, how about a per-cpu clear page,
or short queue of clear pages?

This lets the number of clear pages be throttled to whatever
is worth it. And it handles such cases as a few threads using
the clear pages rapidly, while many other threads don't need any,
with a much higher "average usefulness" per clear page (meaning
the average time a cleared page sits around wasting memory prior
to its being used is much shorter.)

Some locking would still be needed, but per-cpu locking is
a separate, quicker beast than something like mmap_sem.

Mind you, I am not commenting one way or the other on whether any
of this is a good idea. Not my expertise ...

--
I won't rest till it's the best ...
Programmer, Linux Scalability
Paul Jackson <pj@xxxxxxx> 1.925.600.0401
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