> You might get some speed benefit by optimising for the small copies

> You might get some speed benefit by optimising for the small copies
> here.  Define a local on-stack array of N page*'s and point
> process_pages at that if the number of pages is <= N.  Saves a
> malloc/free and is more cache-friendly.  But only if the result is
> measurable!

I have done some benchmarking on this, and it gains about 5-7% on a
microbenchmark with 4kb size copies and about a 1% gain with a more
realistic (but modified for smaller copies) hpcc benchmark. The
performance gain disappears into the noise by about 64kb sized copies.
No measurable overhead for larger copies. So I think its worth including

Included below is the patch (based on v4) - for ease of review the first diff
is just against the latest version of CMA which has been posted here previously.
The second is the entire CMA patch.

Signed-off-by: Chris Yeoh <cyeoh@au1.ibm.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Cc: <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>