Re: 2.4.20pre5aa2

Dave Hansen (haveblue@us.ibm.com)
Mon, 16 Sep 2002 09:39:31 -0700


Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 09:03:41AM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
>
>>+ vmi = get_vmalloc_info();
>
> hmm, not sure if it's better to slowdown vmalloc instead of
> /proc/meminfo and to keep meminfo o1. In theory vmalloc should be used
> only for persistent infrequent allocations, so meminfo has a chance to
> be recalled more frequently with monitors like xosview during workloads.
> Admittedly in final production with no monitoring meminfo is going to
> never be recalled, however I like the idea to keep meminfo very quick.

When I first set out to do it, I modified vmalloc. But, I decided that it would
probably be easier to get a patch in that didn't modify vmalloc itself. The
used calculation is much easier (used += requested_size), but the largest free
chunk gets harder to do. I think that this would have required vfree to get
into the game as well. It seemed much easier to just make meminfo do a little
more work.

-- 
Dave Hansen
haveblue@us.ibm.com

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