16 Commits (ce7ee4e80a72d3b1009ca232be8981de93c015f6)

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Christoph Lameter	6225e93735	Quicklists for page table pages ... On x86_64 this cuts allocation overhead for page table pages down to a fraction (kernel compile / editing load. TSC based measurement of times spend in each function): no quicklist pte_alloc 1569048 4.3s(401ns/2.7us/179.7us) pmd_alloc 780988 2.1s(337ns/2.7us/86.1us) pud_alloc 780072 2.2s(424ns/2.8us/300.6us) pgd_alloc 260022 1s(920ns/4us/263.1us) quicklist: pte_alloc 452436 573.4ms(8ns/1.3us/121.1us) pmd_alloc 196204 174.5ms(7ns/889ns/46.1us) pud_alloc 195688 172.4ms(7ns/881ns/151.3us) pgd_alloc 65228 9.8ms(8ns/150ns/6.1us) pgd allocations are the most complex and there we see the most dramatic improvement (may be we can cut down the amount of pgds cached somewhat?). But even the pte allocations still see a doubling of performance. 1. Proven code from the IA64 arch. The method used here has been fine tuned for years and is NUMA aware. It is based on the knowledge that accesses to page table pages are sparse in nature. Taking a page off the freelists instead of allocating a zeroed pages allows a reduction of number of cachelines touched in addition to getting rid of the slab overhead. So performance improves. This is particularly useful if pgds contain standard mappings. We can save on the teardown and setup of such a page if we have some on the quicklists. This includes avoiding lists operations that are otherwise necessary on alloc and free to track pgds. 2. Light weight alternative to use slab to manage page size pages Slab overhead is significant and even page allocator use is pretty heavy weight. The use of a per cpu quicklist means that we touch only two cachelines for an allocation. There is no need to access the page_struct (unless arch code needs to fiddle around with it). So the fast past just means bringing in one cacheline at the beginning of the page. That same cacheline may then be used to store the page table entry. Or a second cacheline may be used if the page table entry is not in the first cacheline of the page. The current code will zero the page which means touching 32 cachelines (assuming 128 byte). We get down from 32 to 2 cachelines in the fast path. 3. x86_64 gets lightweight page table page management. This will allow x86_64 arch code to faster repopulate pgds and other page table entries. The list operations for pgds are reduced in the same way as for i386 to the point where a pgd is allocated from the page allocator and when it is freed back to the page allocator. A pgd can pass through the quicklists without having to be reinitialized. 64 Consolidation of code from multiple arches So far arches have their own implementation of quicklist management. This patch moves that feature into the core allowing an easier maintenance and consistent management of quicklists. Page table pages have the characteristics that they are typically zero or in a known state when they are freed. This is usually the exactly same state as needed after allocation. So it makes sense to build a list of freed page table pages and then consume the pages already in use first. Those pages have already been initialized correctly (thus no need to zero them) and are likely already cached in such a way that the MMU can use them most effectively. Page table pages are used in a sparse way so zeroing them on allocation is not too useful. Such an implementation already exits for ia64. Howver, that implementation did not support constructors and destructors as needed by i386 / x86_64. It also only supported a single quicklist. The implementation here has constructor and destructor support as well as the ability for an arch to specify how many quicklists are needed. Quicklists are defined by an arch defining CONFIG_QUICKLIST. If more than one quicklist is necessary then we can define NR_QUICK for additional lists. F.e. i386 needs two and thus has config NR_QUICK int default 2 If an arch has requested quicklist support then pages can be allocated from the quicklist (or from the page allocator if the quicklist is empty) via: quicklist_alloc(<quicklist-nr>, <gfpflags>, <constructor>) Page table pages can be freed using: quicklist_free(<quicklist-nr>, <destructor>, <page>) Pages must have a definite state after allocation and before they are freed. If no constructor is specified then pages will be zeroed on allocation and must be zeroed before they are freed. If a constructor is used then the constructor will establish a definite page state. F.e. the i386 and x86_64 pgd constructors establish certain mappings. Constructors and destructors can also be used to track the pages. i386 and x86_64 use a list of pgds in order to be able to dynamically update standard mappings. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net> Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> Cc: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com> Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	18 years ago
Christoph Lameter	81819f0fc8	SLUB core ... This is a new slab allocator which was motivated by the complexity of the existing code in mm/slab.c. It attempts to address a variety of concerns with the existing implementation. A. Management of object queues A particular concern was the complex management of the numerous object queues in SLAB. SLUB has no such queues. Instead we dedicate a slab for each allocating CPU and use objects from a slab directly instead of queueing them up. B. Storage overhead of object queues SLAB Object queues exist per node, per CPU. The alien cache queue even has a queue array that contain a queue for each processor on each node. For very large systems the number of queues and the number of objects that may be caught in those queues grows exponentially. On our systems with 1k nodes / processors we have several gigabytes just tied up for storing references to objects for those queues This does not include the objects that could be on those queues. One fears that the whole memory of the machine could one day be consumed by those queues. C. SLAB meta data overhead SLAB has overhead at the beginning of each slab. This means that data cannot be naturally aligned at the beginning of a slab block. SLUB keeps all meta data in the corresponding page_struct. Objects can be naturally aligned in the slab. F.e. a 128 byte object will be aligned at 128 byte boundaries and can fit tightly into a 4k page with no bytes left over. SLAB cannot do this. D. SLAB has a complex cache reaper SLUB does not need a cache reaper for UP systems. On SMP systems the per CPU slab may be pushed back into partial list but that operation is simple and does not require an iteration over a list of objects. SLAB expires per CPU, shared and alien object queues during cache reaping which may cause strange hold offs. E. SLAB has complex NUMA policy layer support SLUB pushes NUMA policy handling into the page allocator. This means that allocation is coarser (SLUB does interleave on a page level) but that situation was also present before 2.6.13. SLABs application of policies to individual slab objects allocated in SLAB is certainly a performance concern due to the frequent references to memory policies which may lead a sequence of objects to come from one node after another. SLUB will get a slab full of objects from one node and then will switch to the next. F. Reduction of the size of partial slab lists SLAB has per node partial lists. This means that over time a large number of partial slabs may accumulate on those lists. These can only be reused if allocator occur on specific nodes. SLUB has a global pool of partial slabs and will consume slabs from that pool to decrease fragmentation. G. Tunables SLAB has sophisticated tuning abilities for each slab cache. One can manipulate the queue sizes in detail. However, filling the queues still requires the uses of the spin lock to check out slabs. SLUB has a global parameter (min_slab_order) for tuning. Increasing the minimum slab order can decrease the locking overhead. The bigger the slab order the less motions of pages between per CPU and partial lists occur and the better SLUB will be scaling. G. Slab merging We often have slab caches with similar parameters. SLUB detects those on boot up and merges them into the corresponding general caches. This leads to more effective memory use. About 50% of all caches can be eliminated through slab merging. This will also decrease slab fragmentation because partial allocated slabs can be filled up again. Slab merging can be switched off by specifying slub_nomerge on boot up. Note that merging can expose heretofore unknown bugs in the kernel because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those. H. Diagnostics The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths). SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option. Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running with the usual performance and it is much more likely that race conditions can be reproduced. I. Resiliency If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the system to continue. J. Tracing Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T,<slabcache> option during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache and dump the object contents on free. K. On demand DMA cache creation. Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with __GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed. For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is completely eliminated. L. Performance increase Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may enable further performance increases. Tested on: i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + Simulator SLUB Boot options slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This increases the managed chunk size and therefore reduces meta data and locking overhead. slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8. slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified. slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches slub_debug=<options> Enable selective options for all caches slub_debug=<o>,<cache> Enable selective options for a certain set of caches Available Debug options F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency R Red zoning P Object / padding poisoning U Track last free / alloc T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs). To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab allocator. [hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	18 years ago
Andrew Morton	3fcfab16c5	[PATCH] separate bdi congestion functions from queue congestion functions ... Separate out the concept of "queue congestion" from "backing-dev congestion". Congestion is a backing-dev concept, not a queue concept. The blk_* congestion functions are retained, as wrappers around the core backing-dev congestion functions. This proper layering is needed so that NFS can cleanly use the congestion functions, and so that CONFIG_BLOCK=n actually links. Cc: "Thomas Maier" <balagi@justmail.de> Cc: "Jens Axboe" <jens.axboe@oracle.com> Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Cc: Peter Osterlund <petero2@telia.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	19 years ago
David Howells	9361401eb7	[PATCH] BLOCK: Make it possible to disable the block layer [try #6] ... Make it possible to disable the block layer. Not all embedded devices require it, some can make do with just JFFS2, NFS, ramfs, etc - none of which require the block layer to be present. This patch does the following: (*) Introduces CONFIG_BLOCK to disable the block layer, buffering and blockdev support. (*) Adds dependencies on CONFIG_BLOCK to any configuration item that controls an item that uses the block layer. This includes: (*) Block I/O tracing. (*) Disk partition code. (*) All filesystems that are block based, eg: Ext3, ReiserFS, ISOFS. (*) The SCSI layer. As far as I can tell, even SCSI chardevs use the block layer to do scheduling. Some drivers that use SCSI facilities - such as USB storage - end up disabled indirectly from this. (*) Various block-based device drivers, such as IDE and the old CDROM drivers. (*) MTD blockdev handling and FTL. (*) JFFS - which uses set_bdev_super(), something it could avoid doing by taking a leaf out of JFFS2's book. (*) Makes most of the contents of linux/blkdev.h, linux/buffer_head.h and linux/elevator.h contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK being set. sector_div() is, however, still used in places, and so is still available. (*) Also made contingent are the contents of linux/mpage.h, linux/genhd.h and parts of linux/fs.h. (*) Makes a number of files in fs/ contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK. (*) Makes mm/bounce.c (bounce buffering) contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK. (*) set_page_dirty() doesn't call __set_page_dirty_buffers() if CONFIG_BLOCK is not enabled. (*) fs/no-block.c is created to hold out-of-line stubs and things that are required when CONFIG_BLOCK is not set: (*) Default blockdev file operations (to give error ENODEV on opening). (*) Makes some /proc changes: (*) /proc/devices does not list any blockdevs. (*) /proc/diskstats and /proc/partitions are contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK. (*) Makes some compat ioctl handling contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK. (*) If CONFIG_BLOCK is not defined, makes sys_quotactl() return -ENODEV if given command other than Q_SYNC or if a special device is specified. (*) In init/do_mounts.c, no reference is made to the blockdev routines if CONFIG_BLOCK is not defined. This does not prohibit NFS roots or JFFS2. (*) The bdflush, ioprio_set and ioprio_get syscalls can now be absent (return error ENOSYS by way of cond_syscall if so). (*) The seclvl_bd_claim() and seclvl_bd_release() security calls do nothing if CONFIG_BLOCK is not set, since they can't then happen. Signed-Off-By: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>	19 years ago
David Howells	831058dec3	[PATCH] BLOCK: Separate the bounce buffering code from the highmem code [try #6] ... Move the bounce buffer code from mm/highmem.c to mm/bounce.c so that it can be more easily disabled when the block layer is disabled. !!!NOTE!!! There may be a bug in this code: Should init_emergency_pool() be contingent on CONFIG_HIGHMEM? Signed-Off-By: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>	19 years ago
Andreas Gruenbacher	39f0247d38	[PATCH] Access Control Lists for tmpfs ... Add access control lists for tmpfs. Signed-off-by: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	19 years ago
Christoph Lameter	d00bcc98d7	[PATCH] Extract the allocpercpu functions from the slab allocator ... The allocpercpu functions __alloc_percpu and __free_percpu() are heavily using the slab allocator. However, they are conceptually slab. This also simplifies SLOB (at this point slob may be broken in mm. This should fix it). Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	19 years ago
Christoph Lameter	f6ac2354d7	[PATCH] zoned vm counters: create vmstat.c/.h from page_alloc.c/.h ... NOTE: ZVC are *not* the lightweight event counters. ZVCs are reliable whereas event counters do not need to be. Zone based VM statistics are necessary to be able to determine what the state of memory in one zone is. In a NUMA system this can be helpful for local reclaim and other memory optimizations that may be able to shift VM load in order to get more balanced memory use. It is also useful to know how the computing load affects the memory allocations on various zones. This patchset allows the retrieval of that data from userspace. The patchset introduces a framework for counters that is a cross between the existing page_stats --which are simply global counters split per cpu-- and the approach of deferred incremental updates implemented for nr_pagecache. Small per cpu 8 bit counters are added to struct zone. If the counter exceeds certain thresholds then the counters are accumulated in an array of atomic_long in the zone and in a global array that sums up all zone values. The small 8 bit counters are next to the per cpu page pointers and so they will be in high in the cpu cache when pages are allocated and freed. Access to VM counter information for a zone and for the whole machine is then possible by simply indexing an array (Thanks to Nick Piggin for pointing out that approach). The access to the total number of pages of various types does no longer require the summing up of all per cpu counters. Benefits of this patchset right now: - Ability for UP and SMP configuration to determine how memory is balanced between the DMA, NORMAL and HIGHMEM zones. - loops over all processors are avoided in writeback and reclaim paths. We can avoid caching the writeback information because the needed information is directly accessible. - Special handling for nr_pagecache removed. - zone_reclaim_interval vanishes since VM stats can now determine when it is worth to do local reclaim. - Fast inline per node page state determination. - Accurate counters in /sys/devices/system/node/node*/meminfo. Current counters are counting simply which processor allocated a page somewhere and guestimate based on that. So the counters were not useful to show the actual distribution of page use on a specific zone. - The swap_prefetch patch requires per node statistics in order to figure out when processors of a node can prefetch. This patch provides some of the needed numbers. - Detailed VM counters available in more /proc and /sys status files. References to earlier discussions: V1 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113511649910826&w=2 V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114980851924230&w=2 V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115014697910351&w=2 V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767318740&w=2 Performance tests with AIM7 did not show any regressions. Seems to be a tad faster even. Tested on ia64/NUMA. Builds fine on i386, SMP / UP. Includes fixes for s390/arm/uml arch code. This patch: Move counter code from page_alloc.c/page-flags.h to vmstat.c/h. Create vmstat.c/vmstat.h by separating the counter code and the proc functions. Move the vm_stat_text array before zoneinfo_show. [akpm@osdl.org: s390 build fix] [akpm@osdl.org: HOTPLUG_CPU build fix] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com> Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com> Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	19 years ago
KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki	95144c788d	[PATCH] uninline zone helpers ... Helper functions for for_each_online_pgdat/for_each_zone look too big to be inlined. Speed of these helper macro itself is not very important. (inner loops are tend to do more work than this) This patch make helper function to be out-of-lined. inline out-of-line .text 005c0680 005bf6a0 005c0680 - 005bf6a0 = FE0 = 4Kbytes. Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	19 years ago
Christoph Lameter	b20a35035f	[PATCH] page migration reorg ... Centralize the page migration functions in anticipation of additional tinkering. Creates a new file mm/migrate.c 1. Extract buffer_migrate_page() from fs/buffer.c 2. Extract central migration code from vmscan.c 3. Extract some components from mempolicy.c 4. Export pageout() and remove_from_swap() from vmscan.c 5. Make it possible to configure NUMA systems without page migration and non-NUMA systems with page migration. I had to so some #ifdeffing in mempolicy.c that may need a cleanup. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	19 years ago
Matt Mackall	10cef60295	[PATCH] slob: introduce the SLOB allocator ... configurable replacement for slab allocator This adds a CONFIG_SLAB option under CONFIG_EMBEDDED. When CONFIG_SLAB is disabled, the kernel falls back to using the 'SLOB' allocator. SLOB is a traditional K&R/UNIX allocator with a SLAB emulation layer, similar to the original Linux kmalloc allocator that SLAB replaced. It's signicantly smaller code and is more memory efficient. But like all similar allocators, it scales poorly and suffers from fragmentation more than SLAB, so it's only appropriate for small systems. It's been tested extensively in the Linux-tiny tree. I've also stress-tested it with make -j 8 compiles on a 3G SMP+PREEMPT box (not recommended). Here's a comparison for otherwise identical builds, showing SLOB saving nearly half a megabyte of RAM: $ size vmlinux* text data bss dec hex filename 3336372 529360 190812 4056544 3de5e0 vmlinux-slab 3323208 527948 190684 4041840 3dac70 vmlinux-slob $ size mm/{slab,slob}.o text data bss dec hex filename 13221 752 48 14021 36c5 mm/slab.o 1896 52 8 1956 7a4 mm/slob.o /proc/meminfo: SLAB SLOB delta MemTotal: 27964 kB 27980 kB +16 kB MemFree: 24596 kB 25092 kB +496 kB Buffers: 36 kB 36 kB 0 kB Cached: 1188 kB 1188 kB 0 kB SwapCached: 0 kB 0 kB 0 kB Active: 608 kB 600 kB -8 kB Inactive: 808 kB 812 kB +4 kB HighTotal: 0 kB 0 kB 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB 0 kB 0 kB LowTotal: 27964 kB 27980 kB +16 kB LowFree: 24596 kB 25092 kB +496 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB 0 kB 0 kB SwapFree: 0 kB 0 kB 0 kB Dirty: 4 kB 12 kB +8 kB Writeback: 0 kB 0 kB 0 kB Mapped: 560 kB 556 kB -4 kB Slab: 1756 kB 0 kB -1756 kB CommitLimit: 13980 kB 13988 kB +8 kB Committed_AS: 4208 kB 4208 kB 0 kB PageTables: 28 kB 28 kB 0 kB VmallocTotal: 1007312 kB 1007312 kB 0 kB VmallocUsed: 48 kB 48 kB 0 kB VmallocChunk: 1007264 kB 1007264 kB 0 kB (this work has been sponsored in part by CELF) From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Fix 32-bitness bugs in mm/slob.c. Signed-off-by: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	19 years ago
Matt Mackall	30992c97ae	[PATCH] slob: introduce mm/util.c for shared functions ... Add mm/util.c for functions common between SLAB and SLOB. Signed-off-by: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	19 years ago
Dave Hansen	3947be1969	[PATCH] memory hotplug: sysfs and add/remove functions ... This adds generic memory add/remove and supporting functions for memory hotplug into a new file as well as a memory hotplug kernel config option. Individual architecture patches will follow. For now, disable memory hotplug when swsusp is enabled. There's a lot of churn there right now. We'll fix it up properly once it calms down. Signed-off-by: Matt Tolentino <matthew.e.tolentino@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	20 years ago
Carsten Otte	ceffc07852	[PATCH] xip: fs/mm: execute in place ... - generic_file* file operations do no longer have a xip/non-xip split - filemap_xip.c implements a new set of fops that require get_xip_page aop to work proper. all new fops are exported GPL-only (don't like to see whatever code use those except GPL modules) - __xip_unmap now uses page_check_address, which is no longer static in rmap.c, and defined in linux/rmap.h - mm/filemap.h is now much more clean, plainly having just Linus' inline funcs moved here from filemap.c - fix includes in filemap_xip to make it build cleanly on i386 Signed-off-by: Carsten Otte <cotte@de.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	20 years ago
Andy Whitcroft	d41dee369b	[PATCH] sparsemem memory model ... Sparsemem abstracts the use of discontiguous mem_maps[]. This kind of mem_map[] is needed by discontiguous memory machines (like in the old CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM case) as well as memory hotplug systems. Sparsemem replaces DISCONTIGMEM when enabled, and it is hoped that it can eventually become a complete replacement. A significant advantage over DISCONTIGMEM is that it's completely separated from CONFIG_NUMA. When producing this patch, it became apparent in that NUMA and DISCONTIG are often confused. Another advantage is that sparse doesn't require each NUMA node's ranges to be contiguous. It can handle overlapping ranges between nodes with no problems, where DISCONTIGMEM currently throws away that memory. Sparsemem uses an array to provide different pfn_to_page() translations for each SECTION_SIZE area of physical memory. This is what allows the mem_map[] to be chopped up. In order to do quick pfn_to_page() operations, the section number of the page is encoded in page->flags. Part of the sparsemem infrastructure enables sharing of these bits more dynamically (at compile-time) between the page_zone() and sparsemem operations. However, on 32-bit architectures, the number of bits is quite limited, and may require growing the size of the page->flags type in certain conditions. Several things might force this to occur: a decrease in the SECTION_SIZE (if you want to hotplug smaller areas of memory), an increase in the physical address space, or an increase in the number of used page->flags. One thing to note is that, once sparsemem is present, the NUMA node information no longer needs to be stored in the page->flags. It might provide speed increases on certain platforms and will be stored there if there is room. But, if out of room, an alternate (theoretically slower) mechanism is used. This patch introduces CONFIG_FLATMEM. It is used in almost all cases where there used to be an #ifndef DISCONTIG, because SPARSEMEM and DISCONTIGMEM often have to compile out the same areas of code. Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org> Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Martin Bligh <mbligh@aracnet.com> Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> Signed-off-by: Yasunori Goto <y-goto@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Bob Picco <bob.picco@hp.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>	20 years ago
Linus Torvalds	1da177e4c3	Linux-2.6.12-rc2 ... Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it. Let it rip!	20 years ago