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Jes Sorensen authored
This patch contains the ia64 uncached page allocator and the generic allocator (genalloc). The uncached allocator was formerly part of the SN2 mspec driver but there are several other users of it so it has been split off from the driver. The generic allocator can be used by device driver to manage special memory etc. The generic allocator is based on the allocator from the sym53c8xx_2 driver. Various users on ia64 needs uncached memory. The SGI SN architecture requires it for inter-partition communication between partitions within a large NUMA cluster. The specific user for this is the XPC code. Another application is large MPI style applications which use it for synchronization, on SN this can be done using special 'fetchop' operations but it also benefits non SN hardware which may use regular uncached memory for this purpose. Performance of doing this through uncached vs cached memory is pretty substantial. This is handled by the mspec driver which I will push out in...
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