Date:	Fri, 2 Mar 2007 05:21:49 +0100
From:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>
To:	Christoph Lameter <clameter@...r.sgi.com>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Mel Gorman <mel@...net.ie>, mingo@...e.hu,
	jschopp@...tin.ibm.com, arjan@...radead.org,
	torvalds@...ux-foundation.org, mbligh@...igh.org,
	linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: The performance and behaviour of the anti-fragmentation related patches

On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 08:06:25PM -0800, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:
> 
> > > I would say that anti-frag / defrag enables memory unplug.
> > 
> > Well that really depends. If you want to have any sort of guaranteed
> > amount of unplugging or shrinking (or hugepage allocating), then antifrag
> > doesn't work because it is a heuristic.
> 
> We would need additional measures such as real defrag and make more 
> structure movable.
> 
> > One thing that worries me about anti-fragmentation is that people might
> > actually start _using_ higher order pages in the kernel. Then fragmentation
> > comes back, and it's worse because now it is not just the fringe hugepage or
> > unplug users (who can anyway work around the fragmentation by allocating
> > from reserve zones).
> 
> Yes, we (SGI) need exactly that: Use of higher order pages in the kernel 
> in order to reduce overhead of managing page structs for large I/O and 
> large memory applications. We need appropriate measures to deal with the 
> fragmentation problem.

I don't understand why, out of any architecture, ia64 would have to hack
around this in software :(

> > > Thats a value judgement that I doubt. Zone based balancing is bad and has 
> > > been repeatedly patched up so that it works with the usual loads.
> > 
> > Shouldn't we fix it instead of deciding it is broken and add another layer
> > on top that supposedly does better balancing?
> 
> We need to reduce the real hardware zones as much as possible. Most high 
> performance architectures have no need for additional DMA zones f.e. and
> do not have to deal with the complexities that arise there.

And then you want to add something else on top of them?

> > But just because zones are hardware _now_ doesn't mean they have to stay
> > that way. The upshot is that a lot of work for zones is already there.
> 
> Well you cannot get there without the nodes. The control of memory 
> allocations with user space support etc only comes with the nodes.
> 
> > > A. moveable/unmovable
> > > B. DMA restrictions
> > > C. container assignment.
> > 
> > There are alternatives to adding a new layer of virtual zones. We could try
> > using zones, enven.
> 
> No merge them to one thing and handle them as one. No difference between 
> zones and nodes anymore.
>  
> > zones aren't perfect right now, but they are quite similar to what you
> > want (ie. blocks of memory). I think we should first try to generalise what
> > we have rather than adding another layer.
> 
> Yes that would mean merging nodes and zones. So "nones".

Yes, this is what Andrew just said. But you then wanted to add virtual zones
or something on top. I just don't understand why. You agree that merging
nodes and zones is a good idea. Did I miss the important post where some
bright person discovered why merging zones and "virtual zones" is a bad
idea?

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