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Ingo recently introduced a great speedup for allocating new mmaps using the
free_area_cache pointer which boosts the specweb SSL benchmark by 4-5% and
causes huge performance increases in thread creation.

The downside of this patch is that it does lead to fragmentation in the
mmap-ed areas (visible via /proc/self/maps), such that some applications
that work fine under 2.4 kernels quickly run out of memory on any 2.6
kernel.

The problem is twofold:

  1) the free_area_cache is used to continue a search for memory where
     the last search ended.  Before the change new areas were always
     searched from the base address on.

     So now new small areas are cluttering holes of all sizes
     throughout the whole mmap-able region whereas before small holes
     tended to close holes near the base leaving holes far from the base
     large and available for larger requests.

  2) the free_area_cache also is set to the location of the last
     munmap-ed area so in scena...