From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1759230AbYHUNTe (ORCPT ); Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:19:34 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755452AbYHUNTX (ORCPT ); Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:19:23 -0400 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:35250 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755158AbYHUNTW (ORCPT ); Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:19:22 -0400 Message-ID: <48AD6B20.1080105@linux-foundation.org> Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:18:24 -0500 From: Christoph Lameter User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 (Windows/20080708) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robin Holt CC: Andrew Morton , KOSAKI Motohiro , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, tokunaga.keiich@jp.fujitsu.com, stable@kernel.org Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/2] Quicklist is slighly problematic. References: <20080820195021.12E7.KOSAKI.MOTOHIRO@jp.fujitsu.com> <20080820113131.f032c8a2.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20080821024240.GC23397@sgi.com> <48AD689F.6080103@linux-foundation.org> <20080821131404.GC26567@sgi.com> In-Reply-To: <20080821131404.GC26567@sgi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Robin Holt wrote: >> We removed this code because it frees a page before the TLB flush has been >> performed. This code segment was the reason that quicklists were not accepted >> for x86. > > How could we do this. It was a _HUGE_ problem on altix boxes. When you > started a jobs with a large number of MPI ranks, they would all start > from the shepherd process on a single node and the children would > migrate to a different cpu. Unless subsequent jobs used enough memory > to flush those remote quicklists, we would end up with a depleted node > that never reclaimed. Well I tried to get the quicklist stuff resolved at SGI multiple times last year when the early free before flush was discovered but there did not seem to be much interest at that point, so we dropped it. In order to make this work correctly we would need to create a list of remote pages. These remote pages would then be freed after the TLB flush.