Re: [PATCH 00/10] mm: Linux VM Infrastructure to support MemoryPower Management

From: Matthew Garrett
Date: Fri Jun 10 2011 - 14:08:44 EST


On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 10:52:48AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 06:23:07PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > I haven't seen too many ARM servers with 256GB of RAM :) I'm mostly
> > looking at this from an x86 perspective.
>
> But I have seen ARM embedded systems with CPU power consumption in
> the milliwatt range, which greatly reduces the amount of RAM required
> to get significant power savings from this approach. Three orders
> of magnitude less CPU power consumption translates (roughly) to three
> orders of magnitude less memory required -- and embedded devices with
> more than 256MB of memory are quite common.

I'm not saying that powering down memory isn't a win, just that in the
server market we're not even getting unused memory into self refresh at
the moment. If we can gain that hardware capability then sub-node zoning
means that we can look at allocating (and migrating?) RAM in such a way
as to get a lot of the win that we'd gain from actually cutting the
power, without the added overhead of actually shrinking our working set.

--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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