Re: __vmalloc and alloc_page

On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 01:26:11PM -0300, Leandro Motta Barros wrote:

Thanks for the feedback on the previous email. Well, there is another
thing we thought that could be done. '__vmalloc()' allocates its
memory by calling 'alloc_page()' for every necessary page. Wouldn't
it be better calling 'alloc_pages()' to allocate more pages at once
whenever possible? We would need more bookeepping, and sometimes it
could be necessary to actually allocate the memory page per page, but
we think this approach could be a way to use memory blocks of higher order.
Do you think this is feasible or useful?
Also, we would like to know if you have suggestions on topics that we could 
explore and implement.

Higher-order would probably not be as useful as you'd suspect; try
looking at the distribution of available pages of given sizes in /proc/.
OTOH, just being able to get more than one page in one call (not relying
on physically contiguous memory) would be a simple and useful optimization.


-- wli
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