Optional ZONE_DMA V2 V1->V2 - Sh sh64 and parisc do not need ZONE_DMA so do not define CONFIG_ZONE_DMA for those zones. Add patches for those arches to remove the use of ZONE_DMA (untested since I do not have those arches). - Update documentation after feedback from V1.
This patch follows up on the earlier work in Andrew's tree to reduce the number of zones. The patches allow to go to a minimum of 2 zones. This one allows also to make ZONE_DMA optional and therefore the number of zones can be reduced to one. ZONE_DMA is usually used for ISA DMA devices. There are a number of reasons why we would not want to have ZONE_DMA 1. Some arches do not need ZONE_DMA at all. 2. With the advent of IOMMUs DMA zones are no longer needed. The necessity of DMA zones may drastically be reduced in the future. This patchset allows a compilation of a kernel without that overhead. 3. Devices that require ISA DMA get rare these days. All my systems do not have any need for ISA DMA. 4. The presence of an additional zone unecessarily complicates VM operations because it must be scanned and balancing logic must operate on its. 5. With only ZONE_NORMAL one can reach the situation where we have only one zone. This will allow the unrolling of many loops in the VM and allows the optimization of varous code paths in the VM. 6. Having only a single zone in a NUMA system results in a 1-1 correspondence between nodes and zones. Various additional optimizations to critical VM paths become possible. Many systems today can operate just fine with a single zone. If you look at what is in ZONE_DMA then one usually sees that nothing uses it. The DMA slabs are empty (Some arches use ZONE_DMA instead of ZONE_NORMAL, then ZONE_NORMAL will be empty instead). On all of my systems (i386, x86_64, ia64) ZONE_DMA is completely empty. Why constantly look at an empty zone in /proc/zoneinfo and empty slab in /proc/slabinfo? Non i386 also frequently have no need for ZONE_DMA and zones stay empty. The patchset was tested on i386 (UP / SMP), x86_64 (UP, NUMA) and ia64 (NUMA). The RFC posted earlier (see http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115231723513008&w=2) had lots of #ifdefs in them. An effort has been made to minize the number of #ifdefs and make this as compact as possible. The job was made much easier by the ongoing efforts of others to extract common arch specific functionality. I have been running this for awhile now on my desktop and finally Linux is using all my available RAM instead of leaving the 16MB in ZONE_DMA untouched: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ cat /proc/zoneinfo Node 0, zone Normal pages free 4435 min 1448 low 1810 high 2172 active 241786 inactive 210170 scanned 0 (a: 0 i: 0) spanned 524224 present 524224 nr_anon_pages 61680 nr_mapped 14271 nr_file_pages 390264 nr_slab_reclaimable 27564 nr_slab_unreclaimable 1793 nr_page_table_pages 449 nr_dirty 39 nr_writeback 0 nr_unstable 0 nr_bounce 0 cpu: 0 pcp: 0 count: 156 high: 186 batch: 31 cpu: 0 pcp: 1 count: 9 high: 62 batch: 15 vm stats threshold: 20 cpu: 1 pcp: 0 count: 177 high: 186 batch: 31 cpu: 1 pcp: 1 count: 12 high: 62 batch: 15 vm stats threshold: 20 all_unreclaimable: 0 prev_priority: 12 temp_priority: 12 start_pfn: 0 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
