Re: [00/41] Large Blocksize Support V7 (adds memmap support)

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Tue Sep 11 2007 - 17:54:46 EST


On (11/09/07 14:48), Christoph Lameter didst pronounce:
> On Tue, 11 Sep 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:
>
> > But that's not my place to say, and I'm actually not arguing that high
> > order pagecache does not have uses (especially as a practical,
> > shorter-term solution which is unintrusive to filesystems).
> >
> > So no, I don't think I'm really going against the basics of what we agreed
> > in Cambridge. But it sounds like it's still being billed as first-order
> > support right off the bat here.
>
> Well its seems that we have different interpretations of what was agreed
> on. My understanding was that the large blocksize patchset was okay
> provided that I supply an acceptable mmap implementation and put a
> warning in.
>

Warnings == #2 citizen in my mind with known potential failure cases. That
was the point I thought.

> > But even so, you can just hold an open fd in order to pin the dentry you
> > want. My attack would go like this: get the page size and allocation group
> > size for the machine, then get the number of dentries required to fill a
> > slab. Then read in that many dentries and pin one of them. Repeat the
> > process. Even if there is other activity on the system, it seems possible
> > that such a thing will cause some headaches after not too long a time.
> > Some sources of pinned memory are going to be better than others for
> > this of course, so yeah maybe pagetables will be a bit easier (I don't know).
>
> Well even without slab targeted reclaim: Mel's antifrag will sort the
> dentries into separate blocks of memory and so isolate the issue.

--
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab
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