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Speeding up the page allocatorSpeeding up the page allocatorPosted Feb 27, 2009 1:21 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)In reply to: Speeding up the page allocator by bluefoxicy Parent article: Speeding up the page allocator
While it's true that zeroing all freed pages is a bad idea, keeping a pool of freed pages that's refilled during idle periods isn't so crazy. I believe the Windows NT kernel does something along those lines. You do end up putting more code in the fast-path to detect whether the "prezeroed pool" is non-empty, and it only applies to GFP_ZERO pages anyway, so I suspect it ends up not being a win under Linux. Mel's patches bring a noticeable speedup at the benchmark level, and suggest to me that GFP_ZERO pages are not the most numerous allocations in the system. This makes intuitive sense--most allocations back other higher-level allocators in the kernel and/or provide buffer space that's about to be filled. There's no reason to zero it. Complicating those allocations for a minor speedup in GFP_ZERO allocations seems misplaced.
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