Re: [RFC 2/4] Have __free_pages_memory() free in larger chunks.

[Johannes Weiner]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 09:02:53PM +0800, Sam Ben wrote:
> Hi Robin,
> On 07/12/2013 10:03 AM, Robin Holt wrote:
> >Currently, when free_all_bootmem() calls __free_pages_memory(), the
> >number of contiguous pages that __free_pages_memory() passes to the
> >buddy allocator is limited to BITS_PER_LONG.  In order to be able to
> 
> I fail to understand this. Why the original page number is BITS_PER_LONG?

The mm/bootmem.c implementation uses a bitmap to keep track of
free/reserved pages.  It walks that bitmap in BITS_PER_LONG steps
because it is the biggest chunk that is still trivial and cheap to
check if all pages are free in it (chunk == ~0UL).

nobootmem.c was written based on the bootmem.c interface, so it was
probably adapted to keep things similar between the two, short of a
pressing reason not to.
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