Anton noticed (http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg67489.html) that on ppc LPARs with memoryless nodes, a large amount of memory was consumed by slabs and was marked unreclaimable. He tracked it down to slab deactivations in the SLUB core when we allocate remotely, leading to poor efficiency always when memoryless nodes are present. After much discussion, Joonsoo provided a few patches that help significantly. They don't resolve the problem altogether: - memory hotplug still needs testing, that is when a memoryless node becomes memory-ful, we want to dtrt - there are other reasons for going off-node than memoryless nodes, e.g., fully exhausted local nodes Neither case is resolved with this series, but I don't think that should block their acceptance, as they can be explored/resolved with follow-on patches. The series consists of: [1/3] topology: add support for node_to_mem_node() to determine the fallback node [2/3] slub: fallback to node_to_mem_node() node if allocating on memoryless node - Joonsoo's patches to cache the nearest node with memory for each NUMA node [3/3] Partial revert of 81c98869faa5 (""kthread: ensure locality of task_struct allocations") - At Tejun's request, keep the knowledge of memoryless node fallback to the allocator core. include/linux/topology.h | 17 +++++++++++++++++ kernel/kthread.c | 2 +- mm/page_alloc.c | 1 + mm/slub.c | 24 ++++++++++++++++++------ 4 files changed, 37 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) -- 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>