From: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>

The following patches add support for configurable NUMA memory policy
for user processes. It is based on the proposal from last kernel summit
with feedback from various people.

This NUMA API doesn't not attempt to implement page migration or anything
else complicated: all it does is to police the allocation when a page
is first allocation or when a page is reallocated after swapping. Currently
only support for shared memory and anonymous memory is there; policy for
file based mappings is not implemented yet (although they get implicitely
policied by the default process policy)

It adds three new system calls: mbind to change the policy of a VMA,
set_mempolicy to change the policy of a process, get_mempolicy to retrieve
memory policy. User tools (numactl, libnuma, test programs, manpages) can be
found in  ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/ak/numa/numactl-0.6.tar.gz

For details on the system calls see the manpages
http://www.firstfloor.org/~andi/mbind.html
http://www.firstfloor.org/~andi/set_mempolicy.html
http://www.firstfloor.org/~andi/get_mempolicy.html
Most user programs should actually not use the system calls directly,
but use the higher level functions in libnuma
(http://www.firstfloor.org/~andi/numa.html) or the command line tools
(http://www.firstfloor.org/~andi/numactl.html

The system calls allow user programs and administors to set various NUMA memory
policies for putting memory on specific nodes. Here is a short description
of the policies copied from the kernel patch:

 * NUMA policy allows the user to give hints in which node(s) memory should
 * be allocated.
 *
 * Support four policies per VMA and per process:
 *
 * The VMA policy has priority over the process policy for a page fault.
 *
 * interleave     Allocate memory interleaved over a set of nodes,
 *                with normal fallback if it fails.
 *                For VMA based allocations this interleaves based on the
 *                offset into the backing object or offset into the mapping
 *                for anonymous memory. For process policy an process counter
 *                is used.
 * bind           Only allocate memory on a specific set of nodes,
 *                no fallback.
 * preferred      Try a specific node first before normal fallback.
 *                As a special case node -1 here means do the allocation
 *                on the local CPU. This is normally identical to default,
 *                but useful to set in a VMA when you have a non default
 *                process policy.
 * default        Allocate on the local node first, or when on a VMA
 *                use the process policy. This is what Linux always did
 *                in a NUMA aware kernel and still does by, ahem, default.
 *
 * The process policy is applied for most non interrupt memory allocations
 * in that process' context. Interrupts ignore the policies and always
 * try to allocate on the local CPU. The VMA policy is only applied for memory
 * allocations for a VMA in the VM.
 *
 * Currently there are a few corner cases in swapping where the policy
 * is not applied, but the majority should be handled. When process policy
 * is used it is not remembered over swap outs/swap ins.
 *
 * Only the highest zone in the zone hierarchy gets policied. Allocations
 * requesting a lower zone just use default policy. This implies that
 * on systems with highmem kernel lowmem allocation don't get policied.
 * Same with GFP_DMA allocations.
 *
 * For shmfs/tmpfs/hugetlbfs shared memory the policy is shared between
 * all users and remembered even when nobody has memory mapped.




This patch:

This is the core NUMA API code. This includes NUMA policy aware
wrappers for get_free_pages and alloc_page_vma(). On non NUMA kernels
these are defined away.

The system calls mbind (see http://www.firstfloor.org/~andi/mbind.html),
get_mempolicy (http://www.firstfloor.org/~andi/get_mempolicy.html) and
set_mempolicy (http://www.firstfloor.org/~andi/set_mempolicy.html) are
implemented here.

Adds a vm_policy field to the VMA and to the process. The process
also has field for interleaving. VMA interleaving uses the offset
into the VMA, but that's not possible for process allocations.

From: Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de>

  > Andi, how come policy_vma() calls ->set_policy under i_shared_sem?

  I think this can be actually dropped now.  In an earlier version I did
  walk the vma shared list to change the policies of other mappings to the
  same shared memory region.  This turned out too complicated with all the
  corner cases, so I eventually gave in and added ->get_policy to the fast
  path.  Also there is still the mmap_sem which prevents races in the same MM.
   

  Patch to remove it attached.  Also adds documentation and removes the
  bogus __alloc_page_vma() prototype noticed by hch.

From: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>

  A few incremental fixes for NUMA API.

  - Fix a few comments

  - Add a compat_ function for get_mem_policy I considered changing the
    ABI to avoid this, but that would have made the API too ugly.  I put it
    directly into the file because a mm/compat.c didn't seem worth it just for
    this.

  - Fix the algorithm for VMA interleave.

From: Matthew Dobson <colpatch@us.ibm.com>

  1) Move the extern of alloc_pages_current() into #ifdef CONFIG_NUMA.
    The only references to the function are in NUMA code in mempolicy.c

  2) Remove the definitions of __alloc_page_vma().  They aren't used.

  3) Move forward declaration of struct vm_area_struct to top of file.