I looked at some old OS theory books of mine and noticed that one glaring omission in all of these OS books is how to actually keep track of physical pages that are free (i.e. algorithms for actually implementing the free list). I know pretty well how userland memory allocators work, but a big difference with physical page allocation is that fragmentation of physical pages shouldn't be an issue, since the page table can just pick and choose the physical pages without having to care about whether they are contiguous or not. Since avoiding fragmentation is one of the main concerns of userland allocators, it seems like physical page allocation is fundamentally a different problem. I guess that this is not completely accurate if one wants to support superpages to reduce pressure on the TLB.My question: What are techniques are used in modern high-performance kernels for this problem? Also, does this problem become significantly more complicated in NUMA systems?
Page management in OS kernels
operating systems;memory management;virtual memory