Re: [PATCH 2/5] Light Fragmentation Avoidance V20: 002_usemap

[Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2005, Andi Kleen wrote:

> On Wednesday 16 November 2005 02:43, Mel Gorman wrote:
>
> > 1. I was using a page flag, valuable commodity, thought I would get kicked
> >    for it. Usemap uses 1 bit per 2^(MAX_ORDER-1) pages. Page flags uses
> >    2^(MAX_ORDER-1) bits at worse case.
>
> Why does it need multiple bits? A page can only be in one order at a
> time, can't it?
>

Yes, but 1024 pages in one block is one bit per page. Usemap uses 1 page
for all 1024.

> > 2. Fragmentation avoidance tended to break down, very fast.
>
> Why? The algorithm should the same, no?
>

That's what I thought when I wrote it first but it broke down fast
according to bench-stresshighalloc. I'll need to re-examine the patches
and see where I went wrong.

> > 3. When changing a block of pages from one type to another, there was no
> >    fast way to make sure all pages currently allocation would end up on
> >    the correct free list
>
> If you can change the bitmap you can change as well mem_map
>

That's iterating through, potentially, 1024 pages which I considered too
expensive. In terms of code complexity, the page-flags patch adds 237
which is not much of a saving in comparison to 275 that the usemap
approach uses.

Again, I can revisit the page-flag approach if I thought that something
like this would get merged and people would not choke on another page flag
being consumed.

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Java Applications Developer
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab
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