Re: [PATCH 2/3] Sysfs: Allow directories to be populated dynamically

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Fri Oct 30 2009 - 12:05:43 EST


Hello,

Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> In this particular case, the trade off is actually much worse because
>> sysfs_dirent is being increased but the only one which is seeing any
>> kind of memory usage drop is the new msi-x code. Given that there can
>> be only a handful of msi-x controllers even in a fairly large system,
>> I don't think memory usage will be reduced in any meaningful way even
>> on affected systems and if you think about large systems with
>> thousands and tens of thousands block devices, the bloat in
>> sysfs_dirent will waste a lot of memory.
>
> Every attribute sees a drop in memory usage. I think I saw about 30%
> fewer dirents created on boot with this laptop. Why not try this patch
> on one of your machines and see the difference?

Heh... Sorry, I'm still travelling so testing is a bit difficult but
even if you reduce the number of dirents by 30% if you add three
pointers worth of memory to each sysfs_dirent, I don't think it will
amount to any meaningful amount of memory usage drop and given that
sysfs_dirent can be reduced further in size with some tricks, I think
that would be the better way to reduce memory footprint.

Thanks.

--
tejun
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