Re: [QUICKLIST 0/4] Arch independent quicklists V2

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

> On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 04:17:26 -0700 (PDT) Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > > On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:13:25 -0700 (PDT) Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> wrote:
> > > Page table pages have the characteristics that they are typically zero
> > > or in a known state when they are freed.
> > 
> > Well if they're zero then perhaps they should be released to the page 
> > allocator to satisfy the next __GFP_ZERO request.  If that request is 
> > for a pagetable page, we break even (except we get to remove 
> > special-case code).  If that __GFP_ZERO allocation was or some 
> > application other than for a pagetable, we win.
> 
> Nope that wont work.
> 
> 1. We need to support other states of pages other than zeroed.

What does this mean?

> 2. Prezeroing does not make much sense if a large portion of the
>    page is being used. Performance is better if the whole page 
>    is zeroed directly before use.Prezeroing only makes sense for sparse
>    allocations like the page table pages.

This is not related to the above discussion.

> > (Will require some work in the page allocator)
> > (That work will open the path to using the idle thread to prezero pages)
> 
> I already tried that 3 years ago and there was *no* benefit for usual
> users of the a page allocator. The advantage exists only if a small
> portion of the page is used. F.e. For one cacheline there was a 4x 
> improvement. See lkml archives for prezeroing.

Unsurprised.  Were non-temporal stores tried?