Re: [RFC] i386: Remove page sized slabs for pgds and pmds

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

On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:12:56 -0700 (PDT)
Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> wrote:

> The benefit of preconstructed pgds and pmds in the i386 arch code seem to
> be debatable. The performance measurements indicate that there may be a slight
> benefit but it seems to almost vanish in the noise ratio.

yeah, I did a couple hours testing with rc5, rc5+quicklists,
rc5+quicklists+qlhack, where "qlhack" is my patch which removes the
quicklists and mysteriously causes i386 to crash.

I was testing 8-way x86_64 with patch-scripts (wildly fork-intensive),
kernel build and lmbench.

Basically I was unable to observe any statistically meaningful-looking
differences between any of them.

I would like to test qlhack on ia64, because ia64 puts pte-pages into the
quicklists as well, but my ia64 machine is presently indisposed.

My (much) preferred way to handle all this is to remove the quicklists from
all architectures: just use alloc_page() and free_page() for pte pages, pmd
pages, etc.  I remain unaware of any testing whcih indicates that this
would be a bad change.