* Maxime Coquelin maxime.coquelin@stericsson.com wrote:
The role of this framework is to stop the refresh of unused memory to enhance DDR power consumption.
I'm wondering in what scenarios this is useful, and how consistently it is useful.
The primary concern I can see is that on most Linux systems with an uptime more than a couple of minutes RAM gets used up by the Linux page-cache:
$ uptime 14:46:39 up 11 days, 2:04, 19 users, load average: 0.11, 0.29, 0.80 $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 12255096 12030152 224944 0 651560 6000452 -/+ buffers/cache: 5378140 6876956
Even mobile phones easily have days of uptime - quite often weeks of uptime. I'd expect the page-cache to fill up RAM on such systems.
So how will this actually end up saving power consistently? Does it have to be combined with a VM policy that more aggressively flushes cached pages from the page-cache?
A secondary concern is fragmentation: right now we fragment memory rather significantly. For the Ux500 PASR driver you've implemented the section size is 64 MB. Do I interpret the code correctly in that a continuous, 64MB physical block of RAM has to be 100% free for us to be able to turn off refresh and power for this block of RAM?
Thanks,
Ingo