Messages in this thread |  | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH v3] mm: make expand_downwards symmetrical to expand_upwards | | From | Dave Hansen <> | | Date | Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:24:48 -0700 |
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On Fri, 2011-04-22 at 13:19 -0500, James Bottomley wrote: > I looked at converting parisc to sparsemem and there's one problem that > none of these cover. How do you set up bootmem? If I look at the > examples, they all seem to have enough memory in the first range to > allocate from, so there's no problem. On parisc, with discontigmem, we > set up all of our ranges as bootmem (we can do this because we > effectively have one node per range). Obviously, since sparsemem has a > single bitmap for all of the bootmem, we can no longer allocate all of > our memory to it (well, without exploding because some of our gaps are > gigabytes big). How does everyone cope with this (do you search for > your largest range and use that as bootmem or something)?
Sparsemem is purely post-bootmem. It doesn't deal with sparse bootmem. :(
That said, I'm not sure you're in trouble. One bit of bitmap covers 4k (with 4k pages of course) of memory, one byte covers 32k, and A 32MB bitmap can cover 1TB of address space. It explodes, but I think it's manageable. It hasn't been a problem enough up to this point to go fix it.
-- Dave
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