Hi
the bug doesn't impact stability but wastes memory, when more memory
you have more memory you waste. please look this, it's a ONE line patch!
this is an email I sent here two weeks ago, since I've got no reply (and
neigher from linux-mm) i resend it to again, I've also attached aditional
info at the end
On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 10:17:42AM +0100, ulisses wrote:
>
> In a 2.4 kernel, mm/page_alloc.c:free_area_init_core(), in the following
> assignement...
>
> bitmap_size = size >> i;
>
> ...makes bitmap_size be the double of the needed size, this calculum
> assumes that with a 512 byte map size the kernel is mapping 8*512= 4096 chunks
> of memory, that is: one bit of the map is used for each chunk of memory,
> and that's not true.
>
> Really one bit of area->map is used to map two chunks of memory, so in the
> example above an area->map of just 256 bytes is really needed, the other 256
> bytes are _never accessed_.
>
> So the righ thing would be to do is:
>
> bitmap_size = size >> (i+1);
>
>
> also I tested it and it works ok, so I believe I'm right...
>
>
> Please CC: your replies to (I'm not subscribed to this list)
>
> Ulisses Alonso Camar? <[email protected]>
>
> PD: my nick on #kernelnewbies is despistao
an easy to understand indicator to see that I am right is to see
(for instance) how a page index of area->map is calculated,
in __free_pages_ok() we can see the following:
page_idx = page - base;
index = page_idx >> (1 + order);
Imagine the order is 0, that is a continious block of PAGE_SIZE size,
we still shift page_idx one bit, that is two blocks of "order" size are
maped in each bit of area->map
you can also see that MARK_USED macro also makes this shift
Please CC: your replies to (I'm not subscribed to this list)
Ulisses Alonso Camar? <[email protected]>
PD: my nick on #kernelnewbies is despistao
Debian GNU/Linux: a dream come true
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