Re: [patch 3/9] mempool - Make mempools NUMA aware

[Matthew Dobson <colpatch@us.ibm.com>]

Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Jan 2006, Matthew Dobson wrote:
> 
> 
>>That seems a bit beyond the scope of what I'd hoped for this patch series,
>>but if an approach like this is believed to be generally useful, it's
>>something I'm more than willing to work on...
> 
> 
> We need this for other issues as well. f.e. to establish memory allocation 
> policies for the page cache, tmpfs and various other needs. Look at 
> mempolicy.h which defines a subset of what we need. Currently there is no 
> way to specify a policy when invoking the page allocator or slab 
> allocator. The policy is implicily fetched from the current task structure 
> which is not optimal.

I agree that the current, task-based policies are subobtimal.  Having to
allocate and fill in even a small structure for each allocation is going to
be a tough sell, though.  I suppose most allocations could get by with a
small handfull of static generic "policy structures"...  This seems like it
will turn into a signifcant rework of all the kernel's allocation routines,
no small task.  Certainly not something that I'd even start without
response from some other major players in the VM area...  Anyone?


-Matt
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