Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH/RFCv4 0/6] The Contiguous Memory Allocator framework | From | Peter Zijlstra <> | Date | Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:18:57 +0200 |
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On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 04:40 +0200, Michał Nazarewicz wrote: > I think that the biggest problem is fragmentation here. For instance, > I think that a situation where there is enough free space but it's > fragmented so no single contiguous chunk can be allocated is a serious > problem. However, I would argue that if there's simply no space left, > a multimedia device could fail and even though it's not desirable, it > would not be such a big issue in my eyes. > > So, if only movable or discardable pages are allocated in CMA managed > regions all should work well. When a device needs memory discardable > pages would get freed and movable moved unless there is no space left > on the device in which case allocation would fail.
If you'd actually looked at the page allocator you'd see its capable of doing exactly that!
I has the notion of movable pages, it can defragment free space (called compaction).
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