Re: [PATCH 0/3] NUMA boot hash allocation interleaving

Martin J. Bligh
2004-12-14T21:40:23Z

>> Yup, makes a lot of sense to me to stripe these, for the caches that
>> are global (ie inodes, dentries, etc). Only question I'd have is
>> didn't Manfred or someone (Andi?) do this before? Or did that never
>> get accepted? I know we talked about it a while back.
>
> Are you thinking of the 2006-06-05 patch from Andi about using
> the NUMA policy API for boot time allocation?
>
> If so, that patch was accepted, but affects neither allocations
> performed via alloc_bootmem nor __get_free_pages, which are
> currently used to allocate these hashes. vmalloc, however, does
> behave as desired with Andi's patch.

Nope, was for the hashes, but I think maybe it was all vapourware.

> Which is why vmalloc was chosen to solve this problem. There were
> other more complicated possible solutions (e.g. multi-level hash tables,
> with the bottommost/largest level being allocated across all nodes),
> however those would have been so intrusive as to be unpalatable.
> So the vmalloc solution seemed reasonable, as long as it is used
> only on architectures with plentiful vmalloc space.

Yup, seems like a reasonable approach.

M.