LKML News v5.8-rc6

[PATCH v3] x86/mm: use max memory block size on bare metal (Daniel Jordan)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200714205450.945834-1-daniel.m.jordan@oracle.com

On x86, smallest supported block size is 128MiB. This means it needs to create 16,288 sysfs directories for 2TiB memory system. This sysfs creation takes significant amount of the boot time. As the memory hotplug is frequenlty used for the virtualized systems, this commit makes the kernels that aren’t running on a hypervisor to use largest block size (2GiB) on big machines.

The author says the kernel boot time has been 7% faster after applying this patch on the 2TiB memory system.

[patch] mm, memcg: provide a stat to describe reclaimable memory (David Rientjes)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/alpine.DEB.2.23.453.2007142018150.2667860@chino.kir.corp.google.com

Under memory pressure, some of the memory can be reclaimed, so free memory plus some of reclaimable memory is called available memory. This is provided by /proc/meminfo file, but that for each memcg is not. This patch adds the value in memory.stat file in memcg sysfs.

[RFC for Linux v4 0/2] virtio_balloon: Add VIRTIO_BALLOON_F_CONT_PAGES to report continuous pages (Hui Zhu)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/1594867315-8626-1-git-send-email-teawater@gmail.com

This patchset adds VIRTIO_BALLOON_F_CONT_PAGES to virtio_balloon. If this flag is given, virtio_balloon tries to inflate and deflate with continuous pages.

Linux 5.8-rc6 (Linus Torvalds)

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAHk-=wj_gy9xpqFx_aLTtLtFTCTKKLfV9E2bgE5J2GeKit3MCg@mail.gmail.com

We have seen some fluctuations in the rcs of this year. Fortunately, this week rc release looks normal to Torvalds, though it is a big release. I guess 5.8 will be released in the normal manner.

Below is the diffstat of the releases in the last two years.

Note that the y-axis is in logarithm. I draw it using https://github.com/sjp38/relstat and https://github.com/sjp38/lazybox using below command:

$ relstat.py --since 2018-07-20 | ~/lazybox/gnuplot/plot.py \
    --data_fmt table --type labeled-lines --xtics_rotate -90 \
    --font "Times New Roman, 5pt" --ylog --pointsize 0.3

And, below is the diffstat of the -rc4 releases in the last two years.