On 14.09.2012, at 10:11, Paul Mackerras wrote: > On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 01:32:23AM +0200, Alexander Graf wrote: >> >> On 12.09.2012, at 02:34, Paul Mackerras wrote: >> >>> This series of 3 patches makes it possible for guests to allocate >>> whatever size of HPT they need from linear memory preallocated at >>> boot, rather than being restricted to a single size of HPT (by >>> default, 16MB) and having to use the kernel page allocator for >>> anything else -- which in practice limits them to at most 16MB given >>> the default value for the maximum page order. Instead of allocating >>> many individual pieces of memory, this allocates a single contiguous >>> area and uses a simple bitmap-based allocator to hand out pieces of it >>> as required. >> >> Have you tried to play with CMA for this? It sounds like it could buy us exactly what we need. > > Interesting, I hadn't noticed that there. I had a bit of a look at > it, and it's certainly in the right general direction, however it > would need some changes to do what we need. It limits the alignment > to at most 512 pages, i.e. 2MB with 4k pages or 32MB with 64k pages, > but we need RMAs of 64MB to 256MB for PPC970 and they have to be > aligned on their size, as do the HPTs for PPC970. > > Secondly, it has a link with the page allocator that I don't fully > understand, but it seems from the comments in alloc_contig_range() > (mm/page_alloc.c) that you can allocate at most MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES > pages at once, and that defaults to 16MB for ppc64, which isn't nearly > enough. If that's true then it would make it unusable for this. So do you think it makes more sense to reimplement a large page allocator in KVM, as this patch set does, or improve CMA to get us really big chunks of linear memory? Let's ask the Linux mm guys too :). Maybe they have an idea. Alex -- 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