*All* of the buddy bitmaps, *all* of the GPF_ATOMIC, *all* of the zone
watermarks, everything that we depend on every single day, is in the end
just about statistically workable.
We do 1- and 2-order allocations all the time, and we "know" they work.
Yet Nick (and this whole *idiotic* thread) has all been about how they
cannot work.
This is not about performance. Never has been. It's about SGI wanting a
way out of their current 16kB mess.
The way to fix performance is to move to x86-64, and use 4kB pages and be
happy. However, the SGI people want a 16kB (and possibly bigger)
crap-option for their people who are (often _already_) running some
special case situation that nobody else cares about.
It's not about "performance". If it was, they would never have used ia64
in the first place. It's about special-case users that do odd things.
Nobody sane would *ever* argue for 16kB+ blocksizes in general.
Linus
PS. Yes, I realize that there's a lot of insane people out there. However,
we generally don't do kernel design decisions based on them. But we can
pat the insane users on the head and say "we won't guarantee it works, but
if you eat your prozac, and don't bother us, go do your stupid things".
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