Re: [Linaro-mm-sig] [PATCH 08/10] mm: cma: Contiguous Memory Allocatoradded

From: Thomas Hellstrom
Date: Wed Jun 15 2011 - 09:13:27 EST


On 06/15/2011 01:53 PM, Daniel Vetter wrote:
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 20:30, Arnd Bergmann<arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tuesday 14 June 2011 18:58:35 Michal Nazarewicz wrote:
Ah yes, I forgot that separate regions for different purposes could
decrease fragmentation.
That is indeed a good point, but having a good allocator algorithm
could also solve this. I don't know too much about these allocation
algorithms, but there are probably multiple working approaches to this.
imo no allocator algorithm is gonna help if you have comparably large,
variable-sized contiguous allocations out of a restricted address range.
It might work well enough if there are only a few sizes and/or there's
decent headroom. But for really generic workloads this would require
sync objects and eviction callbacks (i.e. what Thomas Hellstrom pushed
with ttm).

Indeed, IIRC on the meeting I pointed out that there is no way to generically solve the fragmentation problem without movable buffers. (I'd do it as a simple CMA backend to TTM). This is exactly the same problem as trying to fit buffers in a limited VRAM area.

/Thomas


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