Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 20 Jun 1998 16:42:02 -0400 (EDT) | From | Mathieu Bouchard <> | Subject | Re: How much kernel stack do we need? |
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> > In 2.1.x kernels, the kernel stack size is 8192 bytes (2 pages) on the i386, > > minus the size of the task structure (around 1000). This means the stack is > > more than 3000 bytes larger than in 2.0.x where it used to be one page. My > > question is: do we really need this? > This is a _very_ good question, since it could save us one > unswappable page _per process_. This might not seem like > an awful lot of memory, but with the current fragmentation > problems this patch could save our butt... > (at least until the zone allocator is ready)
When I first read this I didn't take it seriously, but if you say that 1. it's one per process and 2. it's unswappable, then it's definitely worth it. Imagine something like a webserver trying to fill 2000 requests at once. just saved 8 MB of unswappable memory. This allows for 100-200 more requests at once, possibly.
and 3rd reason: it was 4k in v2.0.*; going to 8k is a regression. This is a word from a once-was asm freak and I had 16k RAM on my first puter. getting it back to 4k and making further optimisations beyond this will help making processes more lightweight, which is always a Good Thing (tm) imho.
Now what is (briefly) the zone allocator? is there any info i can get on this?
matju
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