Re: Kernel is unstable

[Andrea Arcangeli]

On Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 11:04:55AM -0800, David S. Miller wrote:
> Linus didn't find it to be such a gain, and in fact the one
> place that does gain from such merging (sys_brk()) does the
> merging by hand :-)

somewhere in either kernel or glibc we need to do the merging to avoid
allocating new vmas and to grow the avl, otherwise server environment will be
hurted. We're not going to need this feature to run kde well, or to do
compiles, but people using the 3.5G per-task patch or using a 64bit userspace
becaue they're too strict in 3.5G are certainly going to strictly need this
optimization.

I certainly prefer to do the merging at the kernel layer because it's generic
and it doesn't optimize only malloc users.

Andrea