Re: [PATCH] NOMMU: Separate out VMAs

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David Howells wrote:
Bernd Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote:

In do_mmap_private, I've commented out the logic to free excess pages, as it
fragments terribly

I wonder if there's a good heuristic for this.  The problem is that whilst
not releasing excess pages _may_ seem like a good idea, if your system is
something like a single persistent app, then it really is not.

For instance, if such an app allocates a byte over 16MB (perhaps implicitly in
the binfmt driver), then you'd completely waste a large chunk of RAM.  In the
16MB+1 case, the wastage would be a byte less than 16MB.

I think it would be good to have a mechanism to group free pages by purpose - so that if we break up a high-order page in order to allocate memory for process A, then the remaining pages remain in a special pool that the allocator will prefer to hand out only to process A.


Also, I think you're freeing high-order pages unaligned to
their order?

Yeah, but some of the pages might still be in use when we want to release
them.

Not following you here. Is it valid to free an order-2 page that's not aligned at order-2?

In do_munmap, we can deal with freeing more than one vma.  I've not touched
the rb-tree logic in the shared file case, as I have no idea what it's trying
to do given that only exact matches are allowed.

I'd generally rather not do this.  You can't use MAP_FIXED to request adjacent
regions, so why should you anticipate there would be any?

Adjacent regions can happen by accident, and the uClibc malloc will try to merge free areas when they are adjacent - there's a lot of special-case code in there to prevent this on uClinux systems by essentially duplicating VMA tracking. That's something we want to avoid, because it eats performance (especially in threaded apps due to additional locking).


Bernd
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