Re: [PATCH -mm 13/25] Noreclaim LRU Infrastructure

Paul Mundt
2008-06-11T05:09:15Z

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 02:33:34PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:37:02 -0400
> Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:17:23 -0700 (PDT)
> > Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Sun, 8 Jun 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > >
> > > > And it will take longer to get those problems sorted out if 32-bt
> > > > machines aren't even compiing the new code in.
> > >
> > > The problem is going to be less if we dependedn on
> > > CONFIG_PAGEFLAGS_EXTENDED instead of 64 bit. This means that only certain
> > > 32bit NUMA/sparsemem configs cannot do this due to lack of page flags.
> > >
> > > I did the pageflags rework in part because of Rik's project.
> >
> > I think your pageflags work freed up a number of bits on 32
> > bit systems, unless someone compiles a 32 bit system with
> > support for 4 memory zones (2 bits ZONE_SHIFT) and 64 NUMA
> > nodes (6 bits NODE_SHIFT), in which case we should still
> > have 24 bits for flags.
> >
> > Of course, having 64 NUMA nodes and a ZONE_SHIFT of 2 on
> > a 32 bit system is probably total insanity already. I
> > suspect very few people compile 32 bit with NUMA at all,
> > except if it is an architecture that uses DISCONTIGMEM
> > instead of zones, in which case ZONE_SHIFT is 0, which
> > will free up space too :)
>
> Maybe it's time to bite the bullet and kill i386 NUMA support. afaik
> it's just NUMAQ and a 2-node NUMAish machine which IBM made (as400?)
>
> arch/sh uses NUMA for 32-bit, I believe. But I don't know what its
> maximum node count is. The default for sh NODES_SHIFT is 3.

In terms of memory nodes, systems vary from 2 up to 16 or so. It gets
gradually more complex in the SMP cases where we are 3-4 levels deep in
various types of memories that we expose as nodes (ie, 4-8 CPUs with a
dozen different memories or so at various interconnect levels).

As far as testing goes, it's part of the regular build and regression
testing for a number of boards, which we verify on a daily basis
(although admittedly -mm gets far less testing, even though that's where
most of the churn in this area tends to be).