Optional ZONE_DMA This patch follows up on the earlier work in Andrew's tree to reduce the number of zones. The patches allow to go to a minimum of 2 zones. This one allows also to make ZONE_DMA optional and therefore the number of zones can be reduced to one. ZONE_DMA is usually used for ISA DMA devices. Typically modern hardware does not have any of these anymore. So we frequently do not need the zone anymore. The presence of an additional zone unnecessarily complicates VM operations. It must be scanned and balancing logic must operate in it etc etc. If one has a 1-1 correspondence between zones and nodes in a NUMA system then various other optimizations become possible. Many systems today (especially 64 bit but also 32 bit machines with less than 4G of memory) can therefore operate just fine with a single zone. With a single zone various loops can be optimized away by the compiler. Many system currently do not place anything in ZONE_DMA. On most of my systems ZONE_DMA is completely empty. Why constantly look at an empty zone in /proc/zoneinfo and empty slab in /proc/slabinfo? Non i386 also frequently have no need for ZONE_DMA and zones stay empty. The patchset was tested on i386 (UP / SMP), x86_64 (UP, NUMA) and ia64 (NUMA). The RFC posted earlier (see http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115231723513008&w=2) had lots of #ifdefs in them. An effort has been made to minize the number of #ifdefs and make this as compact as possible. The job was made much easier by the ongoing efforts of others to extract common arch specific functionality. I have been running this for awhile now on my desktop and finally Linux is using all my available RAM instead of leaving the 16MB in ZONE_DMA untouched: christoph@pentium940:~$ cat /proc/zoneinfo Node 0, zone Normal pages free 4435 min 1448 low 1810 high 2172 active 241786 inactive 210170 scanned 0 (a: 0 i: 0) spanned 524224 present 524224 nr_anon_pages 61680 nr_mapped 14271 nr_file_pages 390264 nr_slab_reclaimable 27564 nr_slab_unreclaimable 1793 nr_page_table_pages 449 nr_dirty 39 nr_writeback 0 nr_unstable 0 nr_bounce 0 cpu: 0 pcp: 0 count: 156 high: 186 batch: 31 cpu: 0 pcp: 1 count: 9 high: 62 batch: 15 vm stats threshold: 20 cpu: 1 pcp: 0 count: 177 high: 186 batch: 31 cpu: 1 pcp: 1 count: 12 high: 62 batch: 15 vm stats threshold: 20 all_unreclaimable: 0 prev_priority: 12 temp_priority: 12 start_pfn: 0 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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