Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753556AbbEHPyK (ORCPT ); Fri, 8 May 2015 11:54:10 -0400 Received: from mail-ie0-f178.google.com ([209.85.223.178]:33368 "EHLO mail-ie0-f178.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751860AbbEHPyH (ORCPT ); Fri, 8 May 2015 11:54:07 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <21836.51957.715473.780762@quad.stoffel.home> References: <20150507173641.GA21781@gmail.com> <554BA748.9030804@linux.intel.com> <20150507191107.GB22952@gmail.com> <554CBE17.4070904@redhat.com> <20150508140556.GA2185@gmail.com> <21836.51957.715473.780762@quad.stoffel.home> Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 08:54:06 -0700 X-Google-Sender-Auth: 6deP5M2u8luSgptVg87GFc33cPU Message-ID: Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 00/10] evacuate struct page from the block layer, introduce __pfn_t From: Linus Torvalds To: John Stoffel Cc: Ingo Molnar , Rik van Riel , Dave Hansen , Dan Williams , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Boaz Harrosh , Jan Kara , Mike Snitzer , Neil Brown , Benjamin Herrenschmidt , Heiko Carstens , Chris Mason , Paul Mackerras , "H. Peter Anvin" , Christoph Hellwig , Alasdair Kergon , "linux-nvdimm@lists.01.org" , Mel Gorman , Matthew Wilcox , Ross Zwisler , Martin Schwidefsky , Jens Axboe , "Theodore Ts'o" , "Martin K. Petersen" , Julia Lawall , Tejun Heo , linux-fsdevel , Andrew Morton Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1476 Lines: 33 On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 7:40 AM, John Stoffel wrote: > > Now go and look at your /home or /data/ or /work areas, where the > endusers are actually keeping their day to day work. Photos, mp3, > design files, source code, object code littered around, etc. However, the big files in that list are almost immaterial from a caching standpoint. Caching source code is a big deal - just try not doing it and you'll figure it out. And the kernel C source files used to have a median size around 4k. The big files in your home directory? Let me make an educated guess. Very few to *none* of them are actually in your page cache right now. And you'd never even care if they ever made it into your page cache *at*all*. Much less whether you could ever cache them using large pages using some very fancy cache. There are big files that care about caches, but they tend to be binaries, and for other reasons (things like randomization) you would never want to use largepages for those anyway. So from a page cache standpoint, I think the 4kB size still matters. A *lot*. largepages are a complete red herring, and will continue to be so pretty much forever (anonymous largepages perhaps less so). Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/