Re : Re : Re : sparsemem usage

[moreau francis <francis_moreau2000@yahoo.fr>]

Andy Whitcroft wrote:
> It does produce real numbers, it tells you how many reserved pages you
> have.  The places that this is triggered we are interested in why we
> have no memory left.  We are not interested in how many pages are known
> but reserved as against how many pages are backed by page*'s but are
> really holes; they are mearly pages we can't use out of the total we are
> tracking.  We care about how many are not reserved, and how many of
> those are available.
> 
> It would be 'as simple' as adding a PG_real page bit except for two things:
> 
> 1) page flags bits are seriously short supply; there are some 24
> available of which 22 are in use.  Any new user of a bit would have to
> be an extremely valuable change with major benefit to the kernel, and
> 

It's indeed an issue. Could we instead use a combination of flags
that can't happen together. For example PG_Free|PG_Reserved ?

> 2) if you were to try and populate a PG_real flag it would need to be
> populated for _all_ architectures (and there are a lot) for it to be of
> any use.  As you have already noted there is no consistent way to find
> out whether a page is ram so it would be major exercise to get these
> bits setup during boot.
> 
> I think we should take (2) as a hint here.  If we don't have a
> consistent interface for finding whether a page is real or not, we
> obviously have no general need of that information in the kernel.
> 

or maybe _because_ we don't have a consistent interface for finding 
whether a page is real or not, we end up with a strange thing called
page_is_ram() which could be the same for all arch and be implemented
very simply.

BTW, can you try in a linux tree:

$ grep -r page_is_ram arch/

and see how it's implemented...

thanks

Francis