On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Mel Gorman wrote:

quoted text
> Surely, we'll be able to detect the situation where the memory is really
> contiguous as a fast path and have a slower path where fragmentation was
> a problem.

Yes I have a draft here now of a virtual compound page solution that I am 
testing with SLUB. Page allocator first tries to allocate a contiguous 
page. If that is not possible then we string together a contiguous page 
through order 0 allocs and vmalloc.
 
quoted text
> The only implementation question about these patches that hasn't been addressed
> is the mmap() support. What's wrong with it in it's current form. Can it be
> fixed or if it's fundamentally screwed etc. That has fallen by the
> wayside.

Yes I have not heard about those. Got some more ideas how to clean it up 
even more in the meantime. No feedback usually means no objections..... 

quoted text
> I am *very* wary of using reserve pools for anything other than
> emergency situations. If nothing else pools == wasted memory + a sizing
> problem. But hey, it is one option.

Well we need the page pools anyways for large page sizes > MAX_ORDER. But 

quoted text
> Are we going to agree on some sort of plan or are we just going to
> handwave ourselves to death?

Ill try to do the virtual mapped compound pages. Hopefully that will 
allow fallback for compound pages in a generic way.
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