Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC PATCH V4 01/13] netback: page pool version 1

[Wei Liu <wei.liu2@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2012-02-17 at 19:19 +0000, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> > 
> > Hmm, this kind of stuff should be discussed on lkml.
> > 
> > I doubt we want yet another memory allocator, with a global lock
> > (contended), and no NUMA properties.
> 
> That should be fixed. Are there any existing memory pools that could be used
> instead? I (And I think everybody) is all for using the existing APIs if  they
> can do the job. I was lookign a bit at the dmapool code, but that requires 
> something
> we don't have  - the 'struct device'. We could manufacture a fake one, but 
> that just
> stinks of hack.
> 

I've been thinking about this for a long time, so any recommendation is
welcomed.

It is not my intention to write yet another memory allocator. What I
need is a data structure to track pages owned by netback.

Let me state the requirements of this data structure:
     1. limits overall memory used by all vifs (this could also be met
        by the underlying allocator)
     2. provides function to tell whether a particular page is mapped
        from foreign domain -- is_in_pool() is a surrogate for that
     3. provides function to back-reference owner vif of the page

To achieve requirement 2, page pool manipulates page->mapping field. To
achieve requirement 3, page pool maintains idx <-> vif relationship
internally.

I think I can use mempool internally for page allocation. But I still
need a data structure to meet other requirements.

> It [pagepool] also should use the shrinker API I think.

This is doable, but let's make everybody happy with the page pool design
and implementation first.


Wei.


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