Supporting the Allocation of Large Contiguous Regions of Memory

Some modern processors such as later Opterons R © and Power R © processors are able to support large pages sizes such as 1GiB and 16GiB. These page sizes are impractical to reserve at boot time because of the amount of memory that is potentially wasted. Currently, Linux R © as it stands is not well suited to support multiple page sizes because it makes no effort to satisfy allocations for contiguous regions of memory. This paper will discuss features under development that aim to support the allocation of large contiguous areas. This paper begins by discussing the current status of mechanisms to reduce external fragmentation in the page allocator. The reduction of external fragmentation results in sparsely populated superpages that must be reclaimed for contiguous allocations to succeed. We describe how poor reclaim decisions offset the performance benefits of superpages in low-memory situations, before introducing a mechanism for the intelligent reclaim of contiguous regions. Following a presentation of metrics used to evaluate the features and the results, we propose a memory compaction mechanism that migrates pages from sparsely populated to dense regions when enough memory is free to avoid reclaiming pages. We conclude by highlighting that parallel allocators prevent contiguous allocations by taking free pages from regions being reclaimed. We propose a method for addressing this by making pages temporarily unavailable to allocators.