Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC NOTES] x86 ZONE_DMA love

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Thu, May 03, 2018 at 02:03:38PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Sat 28-04-18 19:10:47, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > Another way we could approach this is to get rid of ZONE_DMA. Make GFP_DMA
> > a flag which doesn't map to a zone. Rather, it redirects to a separate
> > allocator. At boot, we hand all memory under 16MB to the DMA allocator. The
> > DMA allocator can have a shrinker which just hands back all the memory once
> > we're under memory pressure (if it's never had an allocation).
> 
> Yeah, that was exactly the plan with the CMA allocator... We wouldn't
> need the shrinker because who cares about 16MB which is not usable
> anyway.

The CMA pool sounds fine.  But please kill GFP_DMA off first / at the
same time.  95% of the users are either completely bogus or should be
using the DMA API, and the few other can use the new allocator directly.