[PATCH] NUMA policies in the slab allocator V2

This patch fixes a regression in 2.6.14 against 2.6.13 that causes an
imbalance in memory allocation during bootup.

The slab allocator in 2.6.13 is not numa aware and simply calls
alloc_pages().  This means that memory policies may control the behavior of
alloc_pages().  During bootup the memory policy is set to MPOL_INTERLEAVE
resulting in the spreading out of allocations during bootup over all
available nodes.  The slab allocator in 2.6.13 has only a single list of
slab pages.  As a result the per cpu slab cache and the spinlock controlled
page lists may contain slab entries from off node memory.  The slab
allocator in 2.6.13 makes no effort to discern the locality of an entry on
its lists.

The NUMA aware slab allocator in 2.6.14 controls locality of the slab pages
explicitly by calling alloc_pages_node().  The NUMA slab allocator manages
slab entries by having lists of available slab pages for each node.  The
per cpu slab cache can only contain slab entries associated with the node
local to the processor.  This guarantees that the default allocation mode
of the slab allocator always assigns local memory if available.

Setting MPOL_INTERLEAVE as a default policy during bootup has no effect
anymore.  In 2.6.14 all node unspecific slab allocations are performed on
the boot processor.  This means that most of key data structures are
allocated on one node.  Most processors will have to refer to these
structures making the boot node a potential bottleneck.  This may reduce
performance and cause unnecessary memory pressure on the boot node.

This patch implements NUMA policies in the slab layer.  There is the need
of explicit application of NUMA memory policies by the slab allcator itself
since the NUMA slab allocator does no longer let the page_allocator control
locality.

The check for policies is made directly at the beginning of __cache_alloc
using current->mempolicy.  The memory policy is already frequently checked
by the page allocator (alloc_page_vma() and alloc_page_current()).  So it
is highly likely that the cacheline is present.  For MPOL_INTERLEAVE
kmalloc() will spread out each request to one node after another so that an
equal distribution of allocations can be obtained during bootup.

It is not possible to push the policy check to lower layers of the NUMA
slab allocator since the per cpu caches are now only containing slab
entries from the current node.  If the policy says that the local node is
not to be preferred or forbidden then there is no point in checking the
slab cache or local list of slab pages.  The allocation better be directed
immediately to the lists containing slab entries for the allowed set of
nodes.

This way of applying policy also fixes another strange behavior in 2.6.13.
alloc_pages() is controlled by the memory allocation policy of the current
process.  It could therefore be that one process is running with
MPOL_INTERLEAVE and would f.e.  obtain a new page following that policy
since no slab entries are in the lists anymore.  A page can typically be
used for multiple slab entries but lets say that the current process is
only using one.  The other entries are then added to the slab lists.  These
are now non local entries in the slab lists despite of the possible
availability of local pages that would provide faster access and increase
the performance of the application.

Another process without MPOL_INTERLEAVE may now run and expect a local slab
entry from kmalloc().  However, there are still these free slab entries
from the off node page obtained from the other process via MPOL_INTERLEAVE
in the cache.  The process will then get an off node slab entry although
other slab entries may be available that are local to that process.  This
means that the policy if one process may contaminate the locality of the
slab caches for other processes.

This patch in effect insures that a per process policy is followed for the
allocation of slab entries and that there cannot be a memory policy
influence from one process to another.  A process with default policy will
always get a local slab entry if one is available.  And the process using
memory policies will get its memory arranged as requested.  Off-node slab
allocation will require the use of spinlocks and will make the use of per
cpu caches not possible.  A process using memory policies to redirect
allocations offnode will have to cope with additional lock overhead in
addition to the latency added by the need to access a remote slab entry.

Changes V1->V2
- Remove #ifdef CONFIG_NUMA by moving forward declaration into
  prior #ifdef CONFIG_NUMA section.

- Give the function determining the node number to use a saner
  name.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mempolicy.h b/include/linux/mempolicy.h
index d6a53ed6ab6..bbd2221923c 100644
--- a/include/linux/mempolicy.h
+++ b/include/linux/mempolicy.h
@@ -159,6 +159,7 @@ extern void mpol_rebind_mm(struct mm_struct *mm, nodemask_t *new);
 extern struct mempolicy default_policy;
 extern struct zonelist *huge_zonelist(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
 		unsigned long addr);
+extern unsigned slab_node(struct mempolicy *policy);
 
 extern int policy_zone;