Re: [RFC 2/2] x86_64, mm: Reinsert the absent memory

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Mon Jun 24 2013 - 13:38:39 EST


On 06/23/2013 02:32 AM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> * Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Yet another thing to consider would be to implement an initialization
>> speedup of 3 orders of magnitude: initialize on the large page (2MB)
>> grandularity and on-demand delay the initialization of the 4K granular
>> struct pages [but still allocating them] - which I suspect are a good
>> chunk of the overhead? That way we could initialize in 2MB steps and speed
>> up the 2 hours bootup of 32 TB of RAM to 14 seconds...
>>
>> [ The cost would be one more branch in the buddy allocator, to detect
>> not-yet-initialized 2 MB chunks as we encounter them. Acceptable I
>> think. ]
>
> One advantage of this scheme would be that we could use it on pretty much
> any box, it would provide instant boot time speedups everywhere [a couple
> of hundred msecs on a small 4GB box - significant I think] - and would
> spread out and parallelize initialization to later stages.
>

Even better if we could start at the 1 GB level, which most of these
really huge machines will have hardware support for.

-hpa


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