tree 9b68dca4f1968199567b2fe631f346795d8eee69
parent d614bb041209fd7cb5e4b35e11a7b2f6ee8f62b8
author Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> 1367141853 +0000
committer Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> 1367301607 +1000

powerpc: Reduce PTE table memory wastage

We allocate one page for the last level of linux page table. With THP and
large page size of 16MB, that would mean we are wasting large part
of that page. To map 16MB area, we only need a PTE space of 2K with 64K
page size. This patch reduce the space wastage by sharing the page
allocated for the last level of linux page table with multiple pmd
entries. We call these smaller chunks PTE page fragments and allocated
page, PTE page.

In order to support systems which doesn't have 64K HPTE support, we also
add another 2K to PTE page fragment. The second half of the PTE fragments
is used for storing slot and secondary bit information of an HPTE. With this
we now have a 4K PTE fragment.

We use a simple approach to share the PTE page. On allocation, we bump the
PTE page refcount to 16 and share the PTE page with the next 16 pte alloc
request. This should help in the node locality of the PTE page fragment,
assuming that the immediate pte alloc request will mostly come from the
same NUMA node. We don't try to reuse the freed PTE page fragment. Hence
we could be waisting some space.

Signed-off-by: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>