Re: Swap vs. ext2 fragmentation avoidance?

Rik van Riel (H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl)
Mon, 27 Apr 1998 17:34:53 +0200 (MET DST)

On Sat, 25 Apr 1998, Anthony Barbachan wrote:
> From: James Mastros <root@jennifer-unix.dyn.ml.org>
>
> >Somthing has occured to me reading the discussions on
> >memory-fragmentation: why we can't effectivily use ext2fs's
> >fragmentation-avoidiance with our memory? I'm shure I'm missing somthing
> >/really/ simple here, but I don't know what it is.
>
> Paging make memory fragmentation irrelevent as a page may be located on any
> 4kb block. And there is no speed difference when accessing memory at
> different locations. Unless that page has been swapped out the the disk.

- We do need to avoid memory fragmentation, since we need
large memory blocks for DMA etc...
- We _are_ thinking about using a zone allocator for memory
usage, so that we can avoid the fragmentation (and do some
easy page-coloring tricks on >16M machines).

We'll probably push this into the kernel in the early
2.3.x series...

Rik.
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