Re: 2G memory split

From: Jeff V. Merkey
Date: Tue Jan 10 2006 - 16:14:01 EST


Jens Axboe wrote:

On Tue, Jan 10 2006, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:


Alan Cox wrote:



On Maw, 2006-01-10 at 09:56 -0700, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:




RH ES uses 4:4 which is ideal and superior to this hack.




Its a non trivial trade-off. 4/4 lets you run very large physical memory
systems much more efficiently than usual but you pay a cost on syscalls
and some other events when using the majority of processors. The 4/4
tricks also give most emulations (eg Qemu) serious heartburn trying to
emulate %cr3 reloading via mmap and other interfaces with high overhead
in relative terms.

Of course AMD64 kind of shot the problem in the head once and for all.





Yep, they sure did. Seriously, the 4:4 option should also be present along with 3:1 and 2:2
splits. You should merge your RH work into this patch and allow both. It would save me one less
patch to maintain off the tree.



You can't compare the two patches, saying that 4:4 should go in because
configurable page offsets is merged is nonsense.

Note that I'm not advocating against 4:4 as such, I have no real
oppinion on that. It has its uses for sure, while it comes with a cost
for others.



I agree and I appreciate your recognizing this. As it stands, if I need 4:4 I just ship on ES3 and ES4. the 3:1
patch in the standard kernel is a very good thing, and you are to be commended for finally getting it in.

P.S. Your bio stuff works great.

Jeff
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