On Fri, Nov 03, 2023 at 07:59:49PM +0100, Petr Tesařík wrote: > I don't think it's possible to improve the allocation logic without > modifying the page allocator and/or the DMA atomic pool allocator to > take additional constraints into account. > > I had a wild idea back in March, but it would require some intrusive > changes in the mm subsystem. Among other things, it would make memory > zones obsolete. I mean, people may actually like to get rid of DMA, > DMA32 and NORMAL, but you see how many nasty bugs were introduced even > by a relatively small change in SWIOTLB. Replacing memory zones with a > system based on generic physical allocation constraints would probably > blow up the universe. ;-) It would be very nice, at least for DMA32 or the 30/31-bit DMA pools used on some architectures. For the x86-style 16MB zone DMA I suspect just having a small pool on the side that's not even exposed to the memory allocator would probably work better. I think a lot of the MM folks would love to be able to kill of the extra zones.
