Messages in this thread |  | | | From | Andi Kleen <> | | Subject | Re: [PATCH 0/7] [RFC] Sizing zones and holes in an architecture independent manner V2 | | Date | Thu, 13 Apr 2006 02:56:59 +0200 |
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On Thursday 13 April 2006 02:22, Mel Gorman wrote:
> I experimented with the idea of all architectures sharing the struct > node_active_region rather than storing the information twice. It got very > messy, particularly for x86 because it needs to store more than nid, > start_pfn and end_pfn for a range of page frames (see node_memory_chunk_s > in arch/i386/kernel/srat.c). Worse, some architecture-specific code > remembers the ranges of active memory as addresses and others as pfn's. In > the end, I was not too worried about having the information in two places, > because the active ranges are kept in __initdata and gets freed.
The problem is not memory consumption but complexity of code/data structures. Keeping information in two places is usually a good cue that something is wrong. This code is also fragile and hard to test.
> I'll admit that for x86_64, the entire code path for initialisation (i.e. > architecture specific and architecture independent paths) is now more > complex. The architecture independent code needed to be able to handle > every variety of node layout which is overkill for x86_64. Nevertheless, > without size_zones(), I thought the architecture-specific code for x86_64 > memory initialisation was a bit easier to read. With > architecture-independent zone size and hole calculation, you only have to > understand the relevant code once, not once for each architecture.
I think i386 SRAT NUMA should be just removed at some point - it never worked all that well and is quite complicated. That leaves IA64, x86-64 and ppc64. I suspect keeping the code there near their low level data structures is better.
> > I have my doubts that is really a improvement over the old state. > > > > For x86_64 in isolation or the entire set of patches?
For x86-64/i386. I haven't read the other architectures.
> > I think it would be better if you just defined some simple "library functions" > > that can be called from the architecture specific code instead of adding > > all this new high level code. > > > > What sort of library functions would you recommend? x86_64 uses > add_active_range() and free_area_init_nodes() from this patchset which > seemed fairly straight-forward.
e.g. a generic size_zones(). Possibly some others.
-Andi
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