Re: [RFC 2.6.11-rc2-mm2 7/7] mm: manual page migration -- sys_page_migrate

Martin J. Bligh
2005-02-16T00:54:24Z

--On Wednesday, February 16, 2005 01:44:01 +0100 Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> wrote:

>> SGI had code in IRIX to do that kind of thing (automatically move a page to
>> the node where most of the references were coming from). Never worked very
>> well, I have been told. So our bias is away from such "automatic" page
>> migration schemes and toward "manual" methods driven either by a user
>> command or a user-level program such as a batch scheduler.
>
> I tried something similar too (scheduling a task to the node with most of
> its memory) and it also never worked very well.

I'm talking about doing it the other way around though - just allocating
the memory local to the task, not bringing the task to the memory.

If kswapd would keep up, we'd be OK - it should keep enough memory free
on the local node that we'd always get local free pages for the new bits.
If we go into fallback and immediate reclaim from __alloc_pages, then I
think everything starts to fall apart.

Perhaps we should just make sure most of the reclaim is being done from
kswapd - we're trying to work out exactly how much of the reclaim happens
where right at the moment.

M.