The big change here is an adjustment to the topology_init path that caused soft lockups on Waiman and Daniel Blue had reported it was an expensive function. Changelog since v2 o Reduce overhead of topology_init o Remove boot-time kernel parameter to enable/disable o Enable on UMA Changelog since v1 o Always initialise low zones o Typo corrections o Rename parallel mem init to parallel struct page init o Rebase to 4.0 Struct page initialisation had been identified as one of the reasons why large machines take a long time to boot. Patches were posted a long time ago to defer initialisation until they were first used. This was rejected on the grounds it should not be necessary to hurt the fast paths. This series reuses much of the work from that time but defers the initialisation of memory to kswapd so that one thread per node initialises memory local to that node. After applying the series and setting the appropriate Kconfig variable I see this in the boot log on a 64G machine [ 7.383764] kswapd 0 initialised deferred memory in 188ms [ 7.404253] kswapd 1 initialised deferred memory in 208ms [ 7.411044] kswapd 3 initialised deferred memory in 216ms [ 7.411551] kswapd 2 initialised deferred memory in 216ms On a 1TB machine, I see [ 8.406511] kswapd 3 initialised deferred memory in 1116ms [ 8.428518] kswapd 1 initialised deferred memory in 1140ms [ 8.435977] kswapd 0 initialised deferred memory in 1148ms [ 8.437416] kswapd 2 initialised deferred memory in 1148ms Once booted the machine appears to work as normal. Boot times were measured from the time shutdown was called until ssh was available again. In the 64G case, the boot time savings are negligible. On the 1TB machine, the savings were 16 seconds. It would be nice if the people that have access to really large machines would test this series and report how much boot time is reduced. arch/ia64/mm/numa.c | 19 +-- arch/x86/Kconfig | 1 + drivers/base/node.c | 11 +- include/linux/memblock.h | 18 +++ include/linux/mm.h | 8 +- include/linux/mmzone.h | 23 ++- mm/Kconfig | 18 +++ mm/bootmem.c | 8 +- mm/internal.h | 23 ++- mm/memblock.c | 34 ++++- mm/mm_init.c | 9 +- mm/nobootmem.c | 7 +- mm/page_alloc.c | 379 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------- mm/vmscan.c | 6 +- 14 files changed, 462 insertions(+), 102 deletions(-) -- 2.3.5 -- 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>