Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Thu, 13:30 PM

Listening to Bill Irwin‘s PGCL (Page Clustering) talk now.

– teach the VM to handle “partial pages” – why do you want to do this? structures sized based on memory take up less space. – shrinking search structures containing pages (radix tree, LRU page replacement lists) – ABI preserving variant is backward compatible – Kernel Summit news: Linus is actually interested in something like this, but generic

Random thought, while my brain takes a break from trying to decipher what Bill is saying: going to OLS with Orna wasn’t the best idea – I’m interested in the talks and meeting people (which I’m not doing well at all, granted), and Orna is more interested in touring Ottawa, etc.

– early boot issues stemming from lots of places assuming that virtual pages are MMUPAGE_SIZE in size, where PGCL does MMUPAGE_SIZE != PAGE_SIZE.

Another random thought: this is one of the most interesting talks / projects presented here, but I’m having a hell of a time understanding Bill. Shame.

– MMUPAGE_SIZE is the physical size of pages – PAGE_SIZE is the virtual size of pages

– Bill is talking about various bugs he had and how he solved them – combination of luck and looking around for hints, auditing code (always necessary when changing fundamental design assumptions…)

Another talk where reading the paper make more sense than listening to the talk. Seems to be quite a lot of them, unfortunately. Good thing the corridor and pub discussions make up for it.