Minimizing the use of tail pages
Minimizing the use of tail pages
[Kernel] Posted May 4, 2019 15:32 UTC (Sat) by corbet
Compound pages are created by the kernel as a way of combining a number of small pages into a single, larger unit. Such pages are implemented as a single "head page" at the beginning, followed by a number of "tail pages". Matthew Wilcox has concluded that it would be beneficial to minimize the use of tail pages in the kernel; he ran a session during the memory-management track at the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit to explore how that could be done. The discussion ranged widely, veering into the representation of DMA I/O operations, but few hard conclusions were reached.