Re: [PATCH 20/20] Get rid of the concept of hot/cold page freeing

[Mel Gorman]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 10:40:17AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Feb 2009, Nick Piggin wrote:
> 
> > > I hope we can get rid of various ugly elements of the quicklists if the
> > > page allocator would offer some sort of support. I would think that the
> >
> > Only if it provides significant advantages over existing quicklists or
> > adds *no* extra overhead to the page allocator common cases. :)
> 
> And only if the page allocator gets fast enough to be usable for
> allocs instead of quicklists.
> 

It appears the x86 doesn't even use the quicklists. I know patches for
i386 support used to exist, what happened with them?

That aside, I think we could win slightly by just knowing when a page is
zeroed and being freed back to the allocator such as when the quicklists
are being drained. I wrote a patch along those lines but it started
getting really messy on x86 so I'm postponing it for the moment.

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab
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