On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 2:07 AM, Jiang Liu wrote: > From: Xishi Qiu > > On architectures with CONFIG_HUGETLB_PAGE_SIZE_VARIABLE set, such as Itanium, > pageblock_order is a variable with default value of 0. It's set to the right > value by set_pageblock_order() in function free_area_init_core(). > > But pageblock_order may be used by sparse_init() before free_area_init_core() > is called along path: > sparse_init() >    ->sparse_early_usemaps_alloc_node() >        ->usemap_size() >            ->SECTION_BLOCKFLAGS_BITS >                ->((1UL << (PFN_SECTION_SHIFT - pageblock_order)) * > NR_PAGEBLOCK_BITS) > > The uninitialized pageblock_size will cause memory wasting because usemap_size() > returns a much bigger value then it's really needed. > > For example, on an Itanium platform, > sparse_init() pageblock_order=0 usemap_size=24576 > free_area_init_core() before pageblock_order=0, usemap_size=24576 > free_area_init_core() after pageblock_order=12, usemap_size=8 > > That means 24K memory has been wasted for each section, so fix it by calling > set_pageblock_order() from sparse_init(). > can you check attached patch? That will kill more lines code instead. Thanks Yinghai