Re: [Lhms-devel] [PATCH 0/7] Fragmentation Avoidance V19

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> 
> Possibly, I can redo the calculations easily enough (have to go for now,
> but I just sent the other ones). But we don't keep a fixed percentage of
> memory free - we cap it ... perhaps we should though?

I suspect the capping may well be from some old HIGHMEM interaction on x86 
(ie "don't keep half a gig free in the normal zone just because we have 
16GB in the high-zone". We used to have serious balancing issues, and I 
wouldn't be surprised at all if there are remnants from that. Stuff that 
simply hasn't been visible, because not a lot of people had many many GB 
of memory even on machines that didn't need HIGHMEM.

		Linus
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