From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from kanga.kvack.org (root@kanga.kvack.org [205.189.68.98]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id UAA26327 for ; Fri, 29 Jan 1999 20:53:29 -0500 Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 20:52:51 -0500 (EST) From: "Benjamin C.R. LaHaise" Subject: Re: Fwd: Inoffensive bug in mm/page_alloc.c In-Reply-To: <990127235552.n0002181.ph@mail.clara.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Paul Hamshere Cc: Linux-MM@kvack.org List-ID: Hello Paul, > Is this of any interest here? Yep! > Paul > ------------------------------ > Hi > I was trawling through the mm sources to try and understand how linux tracks the > use of pages of memory, how kmalloc and vmalloc work, and I think there is a bug > in the kernel (2.0) - it doesn't affect anything, only waste a tiny amount of > memory....does anyone else think it looks wrong? > The problem is in free_area_init where it allocates the bitmaps - I think they > are twice the size they need to be. If you search the mailing list archives from either a year, maybe two ago, someone brought forth the same concern, but Linus rejected the patch on the basis that it wasn't trivially proven correct for *all* sizes of memory. The amount of memory involved is insignificant, and I'd speculate that we'll see a page allocator in 2.3 at which point that loss can disappear. -ben (cleaning out the inbox) -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm my@address' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://humbolt.geo.uu.nl/Linux-MM/