On Wed, 24 Aug 2016, Mel Gorman wrote: > If/when I get back to the page allocator, the priority would be a bulk > API for faster allocs of batches of order-0 pages instead of allocating > a large page and splitting. > OMG. Do we really want to continue this? There are billions of Linux devices out there that require a reboot at least once a week. This is now standard with certain Android phones. In our company we reboot all machines every week because fragmentation degrades performance significantly. We need to finally face up to it and deal with the issue instead of continuing to produce more half ass-ed solutions. Managing memory in 4K chunks is not reasonable if you have machines with terabytes of memory and thus billions of individual page structs to manage. I/O devices are throttling because they cannot manage so much meta data and we get grotesque devices. The kernel needs an effective way to handle large contiguous memory. It needs the ability to do effective defragmentation for that. And the way forward has been clear also for awhile. All objects must be either movable or be reclaimable so that things can be moved to allow contiguity to be restored. We have support for that for the page cache and interestingly enough for CMA now. So this is gradually developing because it is necessary. We need to go with that and provide a full fledged implementation in the kernel that allows effective handling of large objects in the page allocator and we need general logic in the kernel for effective handling of large sized chunks of memory. Lets stop churning tiny 4k segments in the world where even our cell phones have capacities measured in Gigabytes which certainly then already means millions of 4k objects whose management one by one is a drag on performance and makes operating system coding extremely complex. The core of Linux must support that for the future in which we will see even larger memory capacities. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>