quicklists cause a serious memory leak on 32-bit x86,
as documented at:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9991
the reason is that the quicklist pool is a special-purpose
cache that grows out of proportion. It is not accounted for
anywhere and users have no way to even realize that it's
the quicklists that are causing RAM usage spikes. It was
supposed to be a relatively small pool, but as demonstrated
by KOSAKI Motohiro, they can grow as large as:
Quicklists: 1194304 kB
given how much trouble this code has caused historically,
and given that Andrew objected to its introduction on x86
(years ago), the best option at this point is to remove them.
[ any performance benefits of caching constructed pgds should
be implemented in a more generic way (possibly within the page
allocator), while still allowing constructed pages to be
allocated by other workloads. ]
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
985a34bd75