Here's a KSM series, based on mmotm 2013-01-23-17-04: starting with
Petr's v7 "KSM: numa awareness sysfs knob"; then fixing the two issues
we had with that, fully enabling KSM page migration on the way.
(A different kind of KSM/NUMA issue which I've certainly not begun to
address here: when KSM pages are unmerged, there's usually no sense
in preferring to allocate the new pages local to the caller's node.)
This patch:
Introduces new sysfs boolean knob /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/merge_across_nodes
which control merging pages across different numa nodes. When it is set
to zero only pages from the same node are merged, otherwise pages from all
nodes can be merged together (default behavior).
Typical use-case could be a lot of KVM guests on NUMA machine and cpus
from more distant nodes would have significant increase of access latency
to the merged ksm page. Sysfs knob was choosen for higher variability
when some users still prefers higher amount of saved physical memory
regardless of access latency.
Every numa node has its own stable & unstable trees because of faster
searching and inserting. Changing of merge_across_nodes value is possible
only when there are not any ksm shared pages in system.
I've tested this patch on numa machines with 2, 4 and 8 nodes and measured
speed of memory access inside of KVM guests with memory pinned to one of
nodes with this benchmark:
http://pholasek.fedorapeople.org/alloc_pg.c
Population standard deviations of access times in percentage of average
were following:
Hugh notes that this patch brings two problems, whose solution needs
further support in mm/ksm.c, which follows in subsequent patches:
1) switching merge_across_nodes after running KSM is liable to oops
on stale nodes still left over from the previous stable tree;
2) memory hotremove may migrate KSM pages, but there is no provision
here for !merge_across_nodes to migrate nodes to the proper tree.
Signed-off-by: Petr Holasek <pholasek@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Izik Eidus <izik.eidus@ravellosystems.com> Cc: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@de.ibm.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>