From owner-freebsd-net Wed Sep 13 17: 9:52 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from field.videotron.net (field.videotron.net [205.151.222.108]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C2FDF37B423 for ; Wed, 13 Sep 2000 17:09:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from modemcable136.203-201-24.mtl.mc.videotron.ca ([24.201.203.136]) by field.videotron.net (Sun Internet Mail Server sims.3.5.1999.12.14.10.29.p8) with ESMTP id <0G0U00GAVOFZE6@field.videotron.net> for freebsd-net@freebsd.org; Wed, 13 Sep 2000 20:09:35 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 20:13:05 -0400 (EDT) From: Bosko Milekic Subject: Clusters larger than PAGE_SIZE and contigmalloc() X-Sender: bmilekic@jehovah.technokratis.com To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Message-id: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Hi, With the recent cleanups and SMP work that I'm involved with revolving around mbufs and friends, I feel that it's about the time to raise this issue. I'd like to know: Are there any people out there using the "large cluster" feature (i.e. manually defining the cluster size, MCLBYTES, to be larger than a PAGE_SIZE?) If so, how useful do you find this? Did you stumble across any problems worth mentionning? I'm wondering if it would be worth just scrapping this code, as contigmalloc() doesn't help us in this case much anyway, and since most, if not all of the code, that needs such a feature maintains its own free lists and has its own allocator, which is somewhat more efficient as it pre-allocates all of the required space while attaching (the last time I checked). contigmalloc() may have trouble finding the required contiguous physical pages after a certain period of uptime. I would assume that when this was initially written that it was real nice to have around, but I'm not sure if this is still the correct approach for reaching our present goals. Regards, Bosko Milekic bmilekic@technokratis.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message