Re: [PATCH 1/3] mm: completely disable THP by transparent_hugepage=never

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On 06/20/2011 01:19 PM, Cong Wang wrote:
于 2011年06月21日 01:10, Rik van Riel 写道:
On 06/20/2011 01:07 PM, Cong Wang wrote:
于 2011年06月21日 00:58, Mel Gorman 写道:
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 12:34:28AM +0800, Amerigo Wang wrote:
transparent_hugepage=never should mean to disable THP completely,
otherwise we don't have a way to disable THP completely.
The design is broken.


I don't get why it's broken. Why would the user be prevented from
enabling it at runtime?


We need to a way to totally disable it, right? Otherwise, when I
configure
THP in .config, I always have THP initialized even when I pass "=never".

For me, if you don't provide such way to disable it, it is not flexible.

I meet this problem when I try to disable THP in kdump kernel, there is
no user of THP in kdump kernel, THP is a waste for kdump kernel. This is
why I need to find a way to totally disable it.

What you have not explained yet is why having THP
halfway initialized (but not used, and without a
khugepaged thread) is a problem at all.

Why is it a problem for you?

It occupies some memory, memory is valuable in kdump kernel (usually
only 128M). :) Since I am sure no one will use it, why do I still need
to initialize it at all?

Lets take a look at how much memory your patches end
up saving.

By bailing out earlier in hugepage_init, you end up
saving 3 sysfs objects, one slab cache and a hash
table with 1024 pointers.  That's a total of maybe
10kB of memory on a 64 bit system.

I'm not convinced that a 10kB memory reduction is
worth the price of never being able to enable
transparent hugepages when a system is booted with
THP disabled...

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