Re: [RFC PATCH 0/6] mm/hugetlb: Dynamic, NUMA-aware HugePage Cache & Free Page Reporting

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2026 at 09:29:07AM +0200, David Hildenbrand (Arm) wrote:
> On 7/7/26 08:42, Sourav Panda wrote:
> > Overview
> > This patch series introduces a dynamic, NUMA-aware HugePage Cache,
> > backed by a kernel shrinker to safely return memory under pressure, and
> > integrates it with Free Page Reporting (virtio-balloon) for HugeTLB,
> > specifically targeting gigantic (1GB) hugepages. The goal is to solve
> > the tradeoff between allocation latency and memory
> > fungibility in virtualized and heterogeneous cloud environments.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> in general, we consider hugetlb nowadays to be mostly in feature freeze, as we
> realized a while ago that adding more special casing on top of something too
> special for all of MM is only going to hurt us more in the long run.
> 
> We want to have less special casing and less special sauce, not more.
> 
> Now, there is nothing wrong in making hugetlb be less special, by making it use
> more of core infrastructure etc.
> 
> But optimizing for surplus hugetlb pages by teaching hugetlb about new caches
> and its custom free-page-reporting support rather looks like the wrong direction
> for me?
> 
> -- 
> Cheers,
> 
> David


It is currently bypassing free-page-reporting completely.
Making existing free lists not ignore free-page-reporting would
maybe considered "making it be less special"?