Re: bootmem allocator

["Cyrill Gorcunov" <gorcunov@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 1:45 AM, Yinghai Lu <yhlu.kernel@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> wrote:
>  >
>  > Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> writes:
>  >
>  >  > * Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  >
>  >  >> Hi Ingo, Peter,
>  >  >>
>  >  >> small question. It was a patch recently posted which removes memset(x,
>  >  >> 0, x) after __alloc_bootmem call. There are a few another code
>  >  >> snippets who still call memset(x, 0, x). And who is responsible for
>  >  >> memory clearing? bootmem allocator or caller?
>  >  >
>  >  > hm, bootmem allocator is supposed to clear memory. We have a couple of
>  >  > places that rely on that.
>  >
>  >  I was actually considering to change that for the GB pages hugetlbfs
>  >  patchkit, because memset for 1G is a little slow and not needed (will be cleared later
>  >  anyways) and it might be a problem for very large systems with a lot of such
>  >  pages at boot.
>
>  add another zalloc_bootmem?
>
>  YH
>

I think it would be a good idea ;) Btw maybe would be better to call
memset on the code witch relies on "clear" memory explicitly? So we will
clear memory allocated *only* if we really need this.

Cyrill