The zone table is mostly not needed. If we have a node in the page flags
then we can get to the zone via NODE_DATA() which is much more likely to be
already in the cpu cache.
In case of SMP and UP NODE_DATA() is a constant pointer which allows us to
access an exact replica of zonetable in the node_zones field. In all of
the above cases there will be no need at all for the zone table.
The only remaining case is if in a NUMA system the node numbers do not fit
into the page flags. In that case we make sparse generate a table that
maps sections to nodes and use that table to to figure out the node number.
This table is sized to fit in a single cache line for the known 32 bit
NUMA platform which makes it very likely that the information can be
obtained without a cache miss.
For sparsemem the zone table seems to be have been fairly large based on
the maximum possible number of sections and the number of zones per node.
There is some memory saving by removing zone_table. The main benefit is to
reduce the cache foootprint of the VM from the frequent lookups of zones.
Plus it simplifies the page allocator.
[akpm@osdl.org: build fix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
89689ae7f9