Hi Michal, On 18.02.2014 [10:06:58 +0100], Michal Hocko wrote: > Hi, > I have just noticed that ppc has RECLAIM_DISTANCE reduced to 10 set by > 56608209d34b (powerpc/numa: Set a smaller value for RECLAIM_DISTANCE to > enable zone reclaim). The commit message suggests that the zone reclaim > is desirable for all NUMA configurations. > > History has shown that the zone reclaim is more often harmful than > helpful and leads to performance problems. The default RECLAIM_DISTANCE > for generic case has been increased from 20 to 30 around 3.0 > (32e45ff43eaf mm: increase RECLAIM_DISTANCE to 30). Interesting. > I strongly suspect that the patch is incorrect and it should be > reverted. Before I will send a revert I would like to understand what > led to the patch in the first place. I do not see why would PPC use only > LOCAL_DISTANCE and REMOTE_DISTANCE distances and in fact machines I have > seen use different values. > > Anton, could you comment please? I'll let Anton comment here, but in looking into this issue in working on CONFIG_HAVE_MEMORYLESS_NODE support, I realized that any LPAR with memoryless nodes will set zone_reclaim_mode to 1. I think we want to ignore memoryless nodes when we set up the reclaim mode like the following? I'll send it as a proper patch if you agree? diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c index 5de4337..4f6ff6f 100644 --- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -1853,8 +1853,9 @@ static void __paginginit init_zone_allows_reclaim(int nid) { int i; - for_each_online_node(i) - if (node_distance(nid, i) <= RECLAIM_DISTANCE) + for_each_online_node(i) { + if (node_distance(nid, i) <= RECLAIM_DISTANCE || + local_memory_node(nid) != nid) node_set(i, NODE_DATA(nid)->reclaim_nodes); else zone_reclaim_mode = 1; Note, this won't actually do anything if CONFIG_HAVE_MEMORYLESS_NODES is not set, but if it is, I think semantically it will indicate that memoryless nodes *have* to reclaim remotely. And actually the above won't work, because the callpath is start_kernel -> setup_arch -> paging_init [-> free_area_init_nodes -> free_area_init_node -> init_zone_allows_reclaim] which is called before build_all_zonelists. This is a similar ordering problem as I'm having with the MEMORYLESS_NODE support, will work on it. Thanks, Nish -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>