Re: [PATCH] Compound page overhaul

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Tue Nov 23 2004 - 11:13:27 EST


David Howells <dhowells@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxx>:
> > ugh, sorry, I'd forgotten that !MMU needs to use the fields inside
> > pages[1]. It seems that the !MMU requirement is in that case quite
> > dissimilar from what compound pages are supposed to do. Perhaps we should
> > just forget the whole thing and stick with the current design approach?
>
> Nonono... you misunderstand. Compound-pages support uses fields from page[1]
> to store extra data.

I know. I wrote it.

> It's nothing at all to do with MMU vs !MMU.
>

In that case I just dunno what's going on now.

I thought we were discussing the removal of this, from __free_pages_ok():

#ifndef CONFIG_MMU
if (order > 0)
for (i = 1 ; i < (1 << order) ; ++i)
__put_page(page + i);
#endif

by using compound page's refcounting logic instead. But !MMU really wants
to treat that higher-order page as an array of zero-order pages, and that
requires the usual usage of the fields of page[1], page[2], etc.

So what I'm saying is "compound pages are designed for treating a
higher-order page as a higher-order page. !MMU wants to treat a higher
order page as an array of zero-order pages. Hence give up and stick with
the current code".

What are you saying?
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