Re: 2.5.72 for ia64 released

Jesse Barnes
2003-06-20T18:53:03Z

On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 11:49:33AM -0700, David Mosberger wrote:
> >>>>> On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:45:19 -0700, jbarnes@sgi.com (Jesse Barnes) said:
>
> >> I thought the DISCONTIGMEM support is making assumptions about the
> >> physical memory layout. If this is still true, DISCONTIGMEM and
> >> GENERIC cannot go together.
>
> Jesse> No, the discontig patch I posted earlier should allow this. We've
> Jesse> tested it quite a bit in 2.4.
>
> I'm not questioning whether it works on SGI, what I'm asking is
> whether it will work on _all_ possible NUMA architectures, or just on
> SN2.

Yeah, that's what I meant. Jack's patch to 2.4 has been tested on sn2,
DIG, zx1, NEC, and Bull machines, as a generic kernel for the first
three at least (don't know what NEC and Bull did for their testing).

> >> I suspect it would be more preferable if you could make it possible
> >> for a non-NUMA kernel to boot on your machine.
>
> Jesse> That might be nice, but I'd rather have CONFIG_GENERIC turn on
> Jesse> CONFIG_NUMA. It shouldn't get in the way of non-NUMA machines...
>
> What I worry about is that some distributions may end up shipping
> GENERIC kernels, with no easy way to build an optimized kernel. It's
> reasonable to expect highend customers to build their own kernels, but
> I don't think that's quite as reasonable to expect the same from
> someone who buys a workstation.

So you're worried about the performance penalty of turning on NUMA for
generic kernels?

Jesse