On Tuesday 14 June 2011 18:58:35 Michal Nazarewicz wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:03:00 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
For all I know, that is something that is only true for a few very special Samsung devices,
Maybe. I'm just answering your question. :)
Ah yes, I forgot that separate regions for different purposes could decrease fragmentation.
That is indeed a good point, but having a good allocator algorithm could also solve this. I don't know too much about these allocation algorithms, but there are probably multiple working approaches to this.
I would suggest going forward without having multiple regions:
Is having support for multiple regions a bad thing? Frankly, removing this support will change code from reading context passed as argument to code reading context from global variable. Nothing is gained; functionality is lost.
What is bad IMHO is making them the default, which forces the board code to care about memory management details. I would much prefer to have contiguous allocation parameters tuned automatically to just work on most boards before we add ways to do board-specific hacks.
Arnd