Re: 2.5.64-mm6

Andrew Morton (akpm@digeo.com)
Thu, 13 Mar 2003 11:32:09 -0800


Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> wrote:
>
> Andrew Morton <akpm@digeo.com> writes:
>
>
> > This means that large cache-cold executables start significantly faster.
> > Launching X11+KDE+mozilla goes from 23 seconds to 16. Starting OpenOffice
> > seems to be 2x to 3x faster, and starting Konqueror maybe 3x faster too.
> > Interesting.
> >
> > This might cause weird thing to happen, especially on small-memory machines.
>
> That's great. It would be nice to have this as a sysctl or perhaps
> some heuristic based on file size and available memory for 2.6.
>

We shouldn't be putting this in-kernel, really. Userspace can obtain
the same results by running madvise(MADV_WILLNEED) against the mapping
immediately after setting it up. So a simple

map = mmap(...);
+ if (getenv("MAP_PREFAULT"))
+ madvise(map, len, MADV_WILLNEED);

in glibc is enough.

That will work on 2.4, too. I haven't tested that though.

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