Re: [RFC] mm: support multi_freearea to the reduction of external fragmentation

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Thu Apr 22 2021 - 05:37:16 EST


On 19.04.21 04:37, lipeifeng@xxxxxxxx wrote:
Hi Vlastimil Babka:
Thank you very much indeed for your advice.


Hi Vlastimil Babka, schwidefsky,heiko.carstens:

It is a temporary patch to consult experts:
Is it possible to merge the optimization idea and the implementation
method to the baseline?

Well, we cannot really say that :)

History taught that merging large and invasive buddy changes is a tedious task, can take a long time, and can fail even after a lot of discussions and patch series.

Further, usually there has to be a very compelling reason to merge large, invasive buddy changes (read: not only optimize very specific scenarios); otherwise there will just push back because the invasive changes might introduce additional problems or degrade other special cases or even the general case.

Last but not least, there have to be more benchmarks and test cases that proof that other workload won't be degraded to a degree that people care; as one example, this includes runtime overhead when allocating/freeing pages.

What usually works best is improving the code in small steps, doing minor adjustments but moving into the desired direction.

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb