On Tue, 6 Nov 2007 18:11:39 -0800 (PST)
Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> wrote:
http://linux-mm.org/PageReplacementDesign
Linus seems to have vetoed that (unless I am mistaken), so the
chances of that happening soon are probably not very large.
Also, a factor 16 increase in page size is not going to help
if memory sizes also increase by a factor 16, since we already
have trouble with today's memory sizes.
Hence, this patch series.
For some workloads this is the most urgent change, indeed.
Since the patches for this already exist, integrating them
is at the top of my list. Expect this to be integrated into
the split VM patch series by the end of this week.
See http://linux-mm.org/PageReplacementDesign
The current worst case is where we need to scan all of memory,
just to find a few pages we can swap out. With the effects of
lock contention figured in, this can take hours on huge systems.
In order to make the VM more scalable, we need to find acceptable
pages to swap out with low complexity in the VM. The "worst case"
above refers to the upper bound on how much work the VM needs to
do in order to get something evicted from the page cache or swapped
out.
--
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
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