linux-kernel - Re: -mm merge plans -- anti-fragmentation

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Message-ID: <20070711085539.GA18038@infradead.org>
Date:	Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:55:39 +0100
From:	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>
To:	Dave McCracken <dave.mccracken@...cle.com>
Cc:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>, Mel Gorman <mel@...net.ie>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>, kenchen@...gle.com,
	jschopp@...tin.ibm.com, apw@...dowen.org,
	kamezawa.hiroyu@...fujitsu.com, a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl,
	y-goto@...fujitsu.com, clameter@....com, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: -mm merge plans -- anti-fragmentation

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 12:11:45PM -0500, Dave McCracken wrote:
> Ok, maybe disaster is too strong a word.  But any kind of order>0 allocation 
> still has to be approached with fear and caution, with a well tested fallback 
> in the case of the inevitable failures.  How many driver writers would have 
> benefited from using order>0 pages, but turned aside to other less optimal 
> solutions due to their unreliability?  We don't know, and probably never 
> will.  Those people have moved on and won't revisit that design decision.

If you look at almost any other OS they use high-order pages quite a lot.
At least Solaris, IRIX and UnixWare do.

Also not that once we have a high-order pagecache it gives a nice way
to simply reclaim a high-order page directly :)

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