Hi,
> I suspect a big factor here is CONFIG_ARM64_64K_PAGES=y.
Raspberry pi
> 3, with standard fedora kernel (64k pages), minimal install (@core),
> booted to the shell prompt. "free" reports ~122MB of memory as used.
> Same with a self-compiled kernel (4k pages), I get ~44MB of used memory.
> That is almost factor three!
That is almost the complete factor. It's in fact a combination of 64K
pages and CMA. The two together mean that the minimum CMA allocated is
512Mb of RAM. It's a known problem and one we're looking at different
ways/options to resolve and working with upstream to do so and
reconsidering 64K pages in Fedora. We've traditionally gone that route
due to large enterprise systems and to be in sync with downstreams
like RHELSA and CentOS in that regard.
What was the reason to go 64k pages in the first place? Sure, with
larger pages memory management overhead goes down. But on the other
hand the memory footprint goes up, and frankly I'm a bit surprised how
much it goes up. So I'm wondering whenever 64k pages is a net win even
on enterprise machines. Did people benchmark this?
cheers,
Gerd