Having separate page flags for the head and the tail of a compound page allows
the compiler to use bitops instead of operations on a word to check for a tail
page. That is f.e. important for virt_to_head_page() which is used in
various critical code paths (kfree for example):
Code for PageTail(page)
Before:
mov (%rdi),%rdx page->flags
mov %rdx,%rax 3 bytes
and $0x12000,%eax 5 bytes
cmp $0x12000,%rax 6 bytes
je 897 <kfree+0xa7>
After:
mov (%rdi),%rax
test $0x40,%ah (3 bytes)
jne 887 <kfree+0x97>
So we go from 14 bytes to 3 bytes and from 3 instructions to one. From the
use of 2 registers we go to none.
We can only use page flags for this if we have page flags available. This
patch introduces CONFIG_PAGEFLAGS_EXTENDED that is set if pageflags are not
scarce due to SPARSEMEM using page flags for its sectionid on 32 bit NUMA
platforms.
Additional page flag definitions can be added to the CONFIG_PAGEFLAGS_EXTENDED
section in page-flags.h if the functionality depends on PAGEFLAGS_EXTENDED or
if more page flag overlapping tricks are used for the !PAGEFLAGS_EXTENDED
fallback (the upcoming virtual compound patch may hook in here and Rik's/Lee's
additional page flags to solve the reclaim issues could also be added there
[hint... hint... where are these patchsets?]).
Avoiding the overlaying of Pg_reclaim also clears the way for possible use of
compound pages for the pagecache or on the LRU.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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