NOMMU mmap() has an option controlled by a sysctl variable that determines
whether the allocations made by do_mmap_private() should have the excess
space trimmed off and returned to the allocator. Make the initial setting
of this variable a Kconfig configuration option.
The reason there can be excess space is that the allocator only allocates
in power-of-2 size chunks, but mmap()'s can be made in sizes that aren't a
power of 2.
There are two alternatives:
(1) Keep the excess as dead space. The dead space then remains unused for the
lifetime of the mapping. Mappings of shared objects such as libc, ld.so
or busybox's text segment may retain their dead space forever.
(2) Return the excess to the allocator. This means that the dead space is
limited to less than a page per mapping, but it means that for a transient
process, there's more chance of fragmentation as the excess space may be
reused fairly quickly.
During the boot process, a lot of transient processes are created, and
this can cause a lot of fragmentation as the pagecache and various slabs
grow greatly during this time.
By turning off the trimming of excess space during boot and disabling
batching of frees, Coldfire can manage to boot.
A better way of doing things might be to have /sbin/init turn this option
off. By that point libc, ld.so and init - which are all long-duration
processes - have all been loaded and trimmed.
Reported-by: Lanttor Guo <lanttor.guo@freescale.com>
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Lanttor Guo <lanttor.guo@freescale.com>
Cc: Greg Ungerer <gerg@snapgear.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
fc4d5c292b