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authorMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>2007-10-16 01:25:59 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>2007-10-16 09:43:00 -0700
commit64c5e135bf5a2a7f0ededb3435a31adbe0202f0c (patch)
treecb4ff93cbcc3c27176723419a313d7c53545d36b /Documentation/keys-request-key.txt
parentac0e5b7a6b93fb291b01fe1e951e3c16bcdd3503 (diff)
don't group high order atomic allocations
Grouping high-order atomic allocations together was intended to allow bursty users of atomic allocations to work such as e1000 in situations where their preallocated buffers were depleted. This did not work in at least one case with a wireless network adapter needing order-1 allocations frequently. To resolve that, the free pages used for min_free_kbytes were moved to separate contiguous blocks with the patch bias-the-location-of-pages-freed-for-min_free_kbytes-in-the-same-max_order_nr_pages-blocks. It is felt that keeping the free pages in the same contiguous blocks should be sufficient for bursty short-lived high-order atomic allocations to succeed, maybe even with the e1000. Even if there is a failure, increasing the value of min_free_kbytes will free pages as contiguous bloks in contrast to the standard buddy allocator which makes no attempt to keep the minimum number of free pages contiguous. This patch backs out grouping high order atomic allocations together to determine if it is really needed or not. If a new report comes in about high-order atomic allocations failing, the feature can be reintroduced to determine if it fixes the problem or not. As a side-effect, this patch reduces by 1 the number of bits required to track the mobility type of pages within a MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES block. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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