Remove all uses of kmem_cache_t (the most were left in slab.h).  The
typedef for kmem_cache_t is then only necessary for other kernel
subsystems.  Add a comment to that effect.
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

The names_cachep is used for getname() and putname().  So lets put it into
fs.h near those two definitions.
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

fs_cachep is only used in kernel/exit.c and in kernel/fork.c.

It is used to store fs_struct items so it should be placed in linux/fs_struct.h
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

filp_cachep is only used in fs/file_table.c and in fs/dcache.c where
it is defined.

Move it to related definitions in linux/file.h.
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Proper place is in file.h since files_cachep uses are rated to file I/O.
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

vm_area_cachep is used to store vm_area_structs. So move to mm.h.
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Move sighand_cachep definitioni to linux/signal.h

The sighand cache is only used in fs/exec.c and kernel/fork.c.  It is defined
in kernel/fork.c but only used in fs/exec.c.

The sighand_cachep is related to signal processing.  So add the definition to
signal.h.
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Remove bio_cachep from slab.h - it no longer exists.
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

This patch makes the needlessly global "global_faults" static.
Signed-off-by: NAdrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

When booting a NUMA system with nodes that have no memory (eg by limiting
memory), bootmem_alloc_core tried to find pages in an uninitialized
bootmem_map.  This caused a null pointer access.  This fix adds a check, so
that NULL is returned.  That will enable the caller (bootmem_alloc_nopanic)
to alloc memory on other without a panic.
Signed-off-by: NChristian Krafft <krafft@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Cc: Martin Bligh <mbligh@google.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

The patch (as824b) makes percpu_free() ignore NULL arguments, as one would
expect for a deallocation routine.  (Note that free_percpu is #defined as
percpu_free in include/linux/percpu.h.) A few callers are updated to remove
now-unneeded tests for NULL.  A few other callers already seem to assume
that passing a NULL pointer to percpu_free() is okay!

The patch also removes an unnecessary NULL check in percpu_depopulate().
Signed-off-by: NAlan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Node-aware allocation of skbs for the receive path.

Details:

  - __alloc_skb gets a new node argument and cals the node-aware
    slab functions with it.
  - netdev_alloc_skb passed the node number it gets from dev_to_node
    to it, everyone else passes -1 (any node)
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

For node-aware skb allocations we need information about the node in struct
net_device or struct device.  Davem suggested to put it into struct device
which this patch does.

In particular:

 - struct device gets a new int numa_node member if CONFIG_NUMA is set
 - there are two new helpers, dev_to_node and set_dev_node to
   transparently deal with the non-numa case
 - for pci devices the node-info is set to the value we get from
   pcibus_to_node.

Note that for some architectures pcibus_to_node doesn't work yet at the time
we call it currently.  This is harmless and will just mean skb allocations
aren't node-local on this architectures until the implementation of
pcibus_to_node on these architectures have been updated (There are patches for
x86 and x86_64 floating around)

[akpm@osdl.org: cleanup]
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

We have variants of kmalloc and kmem_cache_alloc that leave leak tracking to
the caller.  This is used for subsystem-specific allocators like skb_alloc.

To make skb_alloc node-aware we need similar routines for the node-aware slab
allocator, which this patch adds.

Note that the code is rather ugly, but it mirrors the non-node-aware code 1:1:

[akpm@osdl.org: add module export]
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

It would be possible for /proc/swaps to not always print out the header:

swapon /dev/hdc2
swapon /dev/hde2
swapoff /dev/hdc2

At this point /proc/swaps would not have a header.
Signed-off-by: NSuleiman Souhlal <suleiman@google.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

OOM can panic due to the processes stuck in __alloc_pages() doing infinite
rebalance loop while no memory can be reclaimed.  OOM killer tries to kill
some processes, but unfortunetaly, rebalance label was moved by someone
below the TIF_MEMDIE check, so buddy allocator doesn't see that process is
OOM-killed and it can simply fail the allocation :/

Observed in reality on RHEL4(2.6.9)+OpenVZ kernel when a user doing some
memory allocation tricks triggered OOM panic.
Signed-off-by: NDenis Lunev <den@sw.ru>
Signed-off-by: NKirill Korotaev <dev@openvz.org>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

mm is defined as vma->vm_mm, so use that.
Acked-by: NHugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Currently a user process cannot rise its own oom_adj value (i.e.
unprotecting itself from the OOM killer).  As this value is stored in the
task structure it gets inherited and the unprivileged childs will be unable
to rise it.

The EPERM will be handled by the generic proc fs layer, as only processes
with the proper caps or the owner of the process will be able to write to
the file.  So we allow only the processes with CAP_SYS_RESOURCE to lower
the value, otherwise it will get an EACCES which seems more appropriate
than EPERM.
Signed-off-by: NGuillem Jover <guillem.jover@nokia.com>
Acked-by: NAndrea Arcangeli <andrea@novell.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

kunmap_atomic() will call kpte_clear_flush with vaddr/ptep arguments which
don't correspond if the vaddr is just a normal lowmem address (ie, not in
the KMAP area).  This patch makes sure that the pte is only cleared if kmap
area was actually used for the mapping.
Signed-off-by: NJeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Signed-off-by: NRusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Cc: Zachary Amsden <zach@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Make kmap_atomic/kunmap_atomic denote a pagefault disabled scope.  All non
trivial implementations already do this anyway.
Signed-off-by: NPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: NNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Introduce pagefault_{disable,enable}() and use these where previously we did
manual preempt increments/decrements to make the pagefault handler do the
atomic thing.

Currently they still rely on the increased preempt count, but do not rely on
the disabled preemption, this might go away in the future.

(NOTE: the extra barrier() in pagefault_disable might fix some holes on
       machines which have too many registers for their own good)

[heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com: s390 fix]
Signed-off-by: NPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: NNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: NHeiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

In light of the recent pagefault and filemap_copy_from_user work I've gone
through all the arch pagefault handlers to make sure the inc_preempt_count()
'feature' works as expected.

Several sections of code (including the new filemap_copy_from_user) rely on
the fact that faults do not take locks under increased preempt count.

arch/x86_64 - good
arch/powerpc - good
arch/cris - fixed
arch/i386 - good
arch/parisc - fixed
arch/sh - good
arch/sparc - good
arch/s390 - good
arch/m68k - fixed
arch/ppc - good
arch/alpha - fixed
arch/mips - good
arch/sparc64 - good
arch/ia64 - good
arch/arm - fixed
arch/um - good
arch/avr32 - good
arch/h8300 - NA
arch/m32r - good
arch/v850 - good
arch/frv - fixed
arch/m68knommu - NA
arch/arm26 - fixed
arch/sh64 - fixed
arch/xtensa - good
Signed-off-by: NPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: NNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

When using numa=fake on non-NUMA hardware there is no benefit to having the
alien caches, and they consume much memory.

Add a kernel boot option to disable them.

Christoph sayeth "This is good to have even on large NUMA.  The problem is
that the alien caches grow by the square of the size of the system in terms of
nodes."

Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Manfred Spraul <manfred@colorfullife.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Here's an attempt towards doing away with lock_cpu_hotplug in the slab
subsystem.  This approach also fixes a bug which shows up when cpus are
being offlined/onlined and slab caches are being tuned simultaneously.

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=116098888100481&w=2

The patch has been stress tested overnight on a 2 socket 4 core AMD box with
repeated cpu online and offline, while dbench and kernbench process are
running, and slab caches being tuned at the same time.
There were no lockdep warnings either.  (This test on 2,6.18 as 2.6.19-rc
crashes at __drain_pages
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=116172164217678&w=2 )

The approach here is to hold cache_chain_mutex from CPU_UP_PREPARE until
CPU_ONLINE (similar in approach as worqueue_mutex) .  Slab code sensitive
to cpu_online_map (kmem_cache_create, kmem_cache_destroy, slabinfo_write,
__cache_shrink) is already serialized with cache_chain_mutex.  (This patch
lengthens cache_chain_mutex hold time at kmem_cache_destroy to cover this).
 This patch also takes the cache_chain_sem at kmem_cache_shrink to protect
sanity of cpu_online_map at __cache_shrink, as viewed by slab.
(kmem_cache_shrink->__cache_shrink->drain_cpu_caches).  But, really,
kmem_cache_shrink is used at just one place in the acpi subsystem!  Do we
really need to keep kmem_cache_shrink at all?

Another note.  Looks like a cpu hotplug event can send  CPU_UP_CANCELED to
a registered subsystem even if the subsystem did not receive CPU_UP_PREPARE.
This could be due to a subsystem registered for notification earlier than
the current subsystem crapping out with NOTIFY_BAD. Badness can occur with
in the CPU_UP_CANCELED code path at slab if this happens (The same would
apply for workqueue.c as well).  To overcome this, we might have to use either
a) a per subsystem flag and avoid handling of CPU_UP_CANCELED, or
b) Use a special notifier events like LOCK_ACQUIRE/RELEASE as Gautham was
   using in his experiments, or
c) Do not send CPU_UP_CANCELED to a subsystem which did not receive
   CPU_UP_PREPARE.

I would prefer c).
Signed-off-by: NRavikiran Thirumalai <kiran@scalex86.org>
Signed-off-by: NShai Fultheim <shai@scalex86.org>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

When CONFIG_SLAB_DEBUG is used in combination with ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN, some
debug flags should be disabled which depend on BYTES_PER_WORD alignment.

The disabling of these debug flags is not properly handled when
BYTES_PER_WORD < ARCH_SLAB_MEMALIGN < cache_line_size()

This patch fixes that and also adds an alignment check to
cache_alloc_debugcheck_after() when ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN is used.
Signed-off-by: NKevin Hilman <khilman@mvista.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Cc: Manfred Spraul <manfred@colorfullife.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Imprecise RSS accounting is an irritating ill effect with pt sharing.  After
consulted with several VM experts, I have tried various methods to solve that
problem: (1) iterate through all mm_structs that share the PT and increment
count; (2) keep RSS count in page table structure and then sum them up at
reporting time.  None of the above methods yield any satisfactory
implementation.

Since process RSS accounting is pure information only, I propose we don't
count them at all for hugetlb page.  rlimit has such field, though there is
absolutely no enforcement on limiting that resource.  One other method is to
account all RSS at hugetlb mmap time regardless they are faulted or not.  I
opt for the simplicity of no accounting at all.

Hugetlb page are special, they are reserved up front in global reservation
pool and is not reclaimable.  From physical memory resource point of view, it
is already consumed regardless whether there are users using them.

If the concern is that RSS can be used to control resource allocation, we
already can specify hugetlb fs size limit and sysadmin can enforce that at
mount time.  Combined with the two points mentioned above, I fail to see if
there is anything got affected because of this patch.
Signed-off-by: NKen Chen <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com>
Acked-by: NHugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: Dave McCracken <dmccr@us.ibm.com>
Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
Cc: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Cc: Adam Litke <agl@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Following up with the work on shared page table done by Dave McCracken.  This
set of patch target shared page table for hugetlb memory only.

The shared page table is particular useful in the situation of large number of
independent processes sharing large shared memory segments.  In the normal
page case, the amount of memory saved from process' page table is quite
significant.  For hugetlb, the saving on page table memory is not the primary
objective (as hugetlb itself already cuts down page table overhead
significantly), instead, the purpose of using shared page table on hugetlb is
to allow faster TLB refill and smaller cache pollution upon TLB miss.

With PT sharing, pte entries are shared among hundreds of processes, the cache
consumption used by all the page table is smaller and in return, application
gets much higher cache hit ratio.  One other effect is that cache hit ratio
with hardware page walker hitting on pte in cache will be higher and this
helps to reduce tlb miss latency.  These two effects contribute to higher
application performance.
Signed-off-by: NKen Chen <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com>
Acked-by: NHugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: Dave McCracken <dmccr@us.ibm.com>
Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
Cc: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Cc: Adam Litke <agl@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Despaghettify balance_pdgat() a bit.
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Add an arch_alloc_page to match arch_free_page.
Signed-off-by: NNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

The new swap token patches replace the current token traversal algo.  The old
algo had a crude timeout parameter that was used to handover the token from
one task to another.  This algo, transfers the token to the tasks that are in
need of the token.  The urgency for the token is based on the number of times
a task is required to swap-in pages.  Accordingly, the priority of a task is
incremented if it has been badly affected due to swap-outs.  To ensure that
the token doesnt bounce around rapidly, the token holders are given a priority
boost.  The priority of tasks is also decremented, if their rate of swap-in's
keeps reducing.  This way, the condition to check whether to pre-empt the swap
token, is a matter of comparing two task's priority fields.

[akpm@osdl.org: cleanups]
Signed-off-by: NAshwin Chaugule <ashwin.chaugule@celunite.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Make sure the contention for the token happens _before_ any read-in and
kicks the swap-token algo only when the VM is under pressure.
Signed-off-by: NAshwin Chaugule <ashwin.chaugule@celunite.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Some drivers are returning OOM when it is not in response to a memory
shortage.
Signed-off-by: NNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Dave Airlie <airlied@linux.ie>
Cc: Jaroslav Kysela <perex@suse.cz>
Cc: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Don't cause all threads in all other thread groups to gain TIF_MEMDIE
otherwise we'll get a thundering herd eating our memory reserve.  This may not
be the optimal scheme, but it fits our policy of allowing just one TIF_MEMDIE
in the system at once.
Signed-off-by: NNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Clean up the OOM killer messages to be more consistent.
Signed-off-by: NNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Abort the kill if any of our threads have OOM_DISABLE set.  Having this
test here also prevents any OOM_DISABLE child of the "selected" process
from being killed.
Signed-off-by: NNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Rearrange the struct members in the 'struct zonelist_cache' structure, so
as to put the readonly (once initialized) z_to_n[] array first, where it
will come right after the zones[] array in struct zonelist.

This pretty much eliminates the chance that the two frequently written
elements of 'struct zonelist_cache', the fullzones bitmap and last_full_zap
times, will end up on the same cache line as the performance sensitive,
frequently read, never (after init) written zones[] array.

Keeping frequently written data off frequently read cache lines is good for
performance.

Thanks to Rohit Seth for the suggestion.
Signed-off-by: NPaul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Cc: Rohit Seth <rohitseth@google.com>
Cc: Paul Menage <menage@google.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Optimize the critical zonelist scanning for free pages in the kernel memory
allocator by caching the zones that were found to be full recently, and
skipping them.

Remembers the zones in a zonelist that were short of free memory in the
last second.  And it stashes a zone-to-node table in the zonelist struct,
to optimize that conversion (minimize its cache footprint.)

Recent changes:

    This differs in a significant way from a similar patch that I
    posted a week ago.  Now, instead of having a nodemask_t of
    recently full nodes, I have a bitmask of recently full zones.
    This solves a problem that last weeks patch had, which on
    systems with multiple zones per node (such as DMA zone) would
    take seeing any of these zones full as meaning that all zones
    on that node were full.

    Also I changed names - from "zonelist faster" to "zonelist cache",
    as that seemed to better convey what we're doing here - caching
    some of the key zonelist state (for faster access.)

    See below for some performance benchmark results.  After all that
    discussion with David on why I didn't need them, I went and got
    some ;).  I wanted to verify that I had not hurt the normal case
    of memory allocation noticeably.  At least for my one little
    microbenchmark, I found (1) the normal case wasn't affected, and
    (2) workloads that forced scanning across multiple nodes for
    memory improved up to 10% fewer System CPU cycles and lower
    elapsed clock time ('sys' and 'real').  Good.  See details, below.

    I didn't have the logic in get_page_from_freelist() for various
    full nodes and zone reclaim failures correct.  That should be
    fixed up now - notice the new goto labels zonelist_scan,
    this_zone_full, and try_next_zone, in get_page_from_freelist().

There are two reasons I persued this alternative, over some earlier
proposals that would have focused on optimizing the fake numa
emulation case by caching the last useful zone:

 1) Contrary to what I said before, we (SGI, on large ia64 sn2 systems)
    have seen real customer loads where the cost to scan the zonelist
    was a problem, due to many nodes being full of memory before
    we got to a node we could use.  Or at least, I think we have.
    This was related to me by another engineer, based on experiences
    from some time past.  So this is not guaranteed.  Most likely, though.

    The following approach should help such real numa systems just as
    much as it helps fake numa systems, or any combination thereof.

 2) The effort to distinguish fake from real numa, using node_distance,
    so that we could cache a fake numa node and optimize choosing
    it over equivalent distance fake nodes, while continuing to
    properly scan all real nodes in distance order, was going to
    require a nasty blob of zonelist and node distance munging.

    The following approach has no new dependency on node distances or
    zone sorting.

See comment in the patch below for a description of what it actually does.

Technical details of note (or controversy):

 - See the use of "zlc_active" and "did_zlc_setup" below, to delay
   adding any work for this new mechanism until we've looked at the
   first zone in zonelist.  I figured the odds of the first zone
   having the memory we needed were high enough that we should just
   look there, first, then get fancy only if we need to keep looking.

 - Some odd hackery was needed to add items to struct zonelist, while
   not tripping up the custom zonelists built by the mm/mempolicy.c
   code for MPOL_BIND.  My usual wordy comments below explain this.
   Search for "MPOL_BIND".

 - Some per-node data in the struct zonelist is now modified frequently,
   with no locking.  Multiple CPU cores on a node could hit and mangle
   this data.  The theory is that this is just performance hint data,
   and the memory allocator will work just fine despite any such mangling.
   The fields at risk are the struct 'zonelist_cache' fields 'fullzones'
   (a bitmask) and 'last_full_zap' (unsigned long jiffies).  It should
   all be self correcting after at most a one second delay.

 - This still does a linear scan of the same lengths as before.  All
   I've optimized is making the scan faster, not algorithmically
   shorter.  It is now able to scan a compact array of 'unsigned
   short' in the case of many full nodes, so one cache line should
   cover quite a few nodes, rather than each node hitting another
   one or two new and distinct cache lines.

 - If both Andi and Nick don't find this too complicated, I will be
   (pleasantly) flabbergasted.

 - I removed the comment claiming we only use one cachline's worth of
   zonelist.  We seem, at least in the fake numa case, to have put the
   lie to that claim.

 - I pay no attention to the various watermarks and such in this performance
   hint.  A node could be marked full for one watermark, and then skipped
   over when searching for a page using a different watermark.  I think
   that's actually quite ok, as it will tend to slightly increase the
   spreading of memory over other nodes, away from a memory stressed node.

===============

Performance - some benchmark results and analysis:

This benchmark runs a memory hog program that uses multiple
threads to touch alot of memory as quickly as it can.

Multiple runs were made, touching 12, 38, 64 or 90 GBytes out of
the total 96 GBytes on the system, and using 1, 19, 37, or 55
threads (on a 56 CPU system.)  System, user and real (elapsed)
timings were recorded for each run, shown in units of seconds,
in the table below.

Two kernels were tested - 2.6.18-mm3 and the same kernel with
this zonelist caching patch added.  The table also shows the
percentage improvement the zonelist caching sys time is over
(lower than) the stock *-mm kernel.

      number     2.6.18-mm3	   zonelist-cache    delta (< 0 good)	percent
 GBs    N  	------------	   --------------    ----------------	systime
 mem threads   sys user  real	  sys  user  real     sys  user  real	 better
  12	 1     153   24   177	  151	 24   176      -2     0    -1	   1%
  12	19	99   22     8	   99	 22	8	0     0     0	   0%
  12	37     111   25     6	  112	 25	6	1     0     0	  -0%
  12	55     115   25     5	  110	 23	5      -5    -2     0	   4%
  38	 1     502   74   576	  497	 73   570      -5    -1    -6	   0%
  38	19     426   78    48	  373	 76    39     -53    -2    -9	  12%
  38	37     544   83    36	  547	 82    36	3    -1     0	  -0%
  38	55     501   77    23	  511	 80    24      10     3     1	  -1%
  64	 1     917  125  1042	  890	124  1014     -27    -1   -28	   2%
  64	19    1118  138   119	  965	141   103    -153     3   -16	  13%
  64	37    1202  151    94	 1136	150    81     -66    -1   -13	   5%
  64	55    1118  141    61	 1072	140    58     -46    -1    -3	   4%
  90	 1    1342  177  1519	 1275	174  1450     -67    -3   -69	   4%
  90	19    2392  199   192	 2116	189   176    -276   -10   -16	  11%
  90	37    3313  238   175	 2972	225   145    -341   -13   -30	  10%
  90	55    1948  210   104	 1843	213   100    -105     3    -4	   5%

Notes:
 1) This test ran a memory hog program that started a specified number N of
    threads, and had each thread allocate and touch 1/N'th of
    the total memory to be used in the test run in a single loop,
    writing a constant word to memory, one store every 4096 bytes.
    Watching this test during some earlier trial runs, I would see
    each of these threads sit down on one CPU and stay there, for
    the remainder of the pass, a different CPU for each thread.

 2) The 'real' column is not comparable to the 'sys' or 'user' columns.
    The 'real' column is seconds wall clock time elapsed, from beginning
    to end of that test pass.  The 'sys' and 'user' columns are total
    CPU seconds spent on that test pass.  For a 19 thread test run,
    for example, the sum of 'sys' and 'user' could be up to 19 times the
    number of 'real' elapsed wall clock seconds.

 3) Tests were run on a fresh, single-user boot, to minimize the amount
    of memory already in use at the start of the test, and to minimize
    the amount of background activity that might interfere.

 4) Tests were done on a 56 CPU, 28 Node system with 96 GBytes of RAM.

 5) Notice that the 'real' time gets large for the single thread runs, even
    though the measured 'sys' and 'user' times are modest.  I'm not sure what
    that means - probably something to do with it being slow for one thread to
    be accessing memory along ways away.  Perhaps the fake numa system, running
    ostensibly the same workload, would not show this substantial degradation
    of 'real' time for one thread on many nodes -- lets hope not.

 6) The high thread count passes (one thread per CPU - on 55 of 56 CPUs)
    ran quite efficiently, as one might expect.  Each pair of threads needed
    to allocate and touch the memory on the node the two threads shared, a
    pleasantly parallizable workload.

 7) The intermediate thread count passes, when asking for alot of memory forcing
    them to go to a few neighboring nodes, improved the most with this zonelist
    caching patch.

Conclusions:
 * This zonelist cache patch probably makes little difference one way or the
   other for most workloads on real numa hardware, if those workloads avoid
   heavy off node allocations.
 * For memory intensive workloads requiring substantial off-node allocations
   on real numa hardware, this patch improves both kernel and elapsed timings
   up to ten per-cent.
 * For fake numa systems, I'm optimistic, but will have to leave that up to
   Rohit Seth to actually test (once I get him a 2.6.18 backport.)
Signed-off-by: NPaul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Cc: Rohit Seth <rohitseth@google.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@cs.washington.edu>
Cc: Paul Menage <menage@google.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

The zone table is mostly not needed.  If we have a node in the page flags
then we can get to the zone via NODE_DATA() which is much more likely to be
already in the cpu cache.

In case of SMP and UP NODE_DATA() is a constant pointer which allows us to
access an exact replica of zonetable in the node_zones field.  In all of
the above cases there will be no need at all for the zone table.

The only remaining case is if in a NUMA system the node numbers do not fit
into the page flags.  In that case we make sparse generate a table that
maps sections to nodes and use that table to to figure out the node number.
 This table is sized to fit in a single cache line for the known 32 bit
NUMA platform which makes it very likely that the information can be
obtained without a cache miss.

For sparsemem the zone table seems to be have been fairly large based on
the maximum possible number of sections and the number of zones per node.
There is some memory saving by removing zone_table.  The main benefit is to
reduce the cache foootprint of the VM from the frequent lookups of zones.
Plus it simplifies the page allocator.

[akpm@osdl.org: build fix]
Signed-off-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Signed-off-by: NKen Chen <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com>
Cc: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

- s/freeliest/freelist/ spelling fix

- Check for NULL *z zone seems useless - even if it could happen, so
  what?  Perhaps we should have a check later on if we are faced with an
  allocation request that is not allowed to fail - shouldn't that be a
  serious kernel error, passing an empty zonelist with a mandate to not
  fail?

- Initializing 'z' to zonelist->zones can wait until after the first
  get_page_from_freelist() fails; we only use 'z' in the wakeup_kswapd()
  loop, so let's initialize 'z' there, in a 'for' loop.  Seems clearer.

- Remove superfluous braces around a break

- Fix a couple errant spaces

- Adjust indentation on the cpuset_zone_allowed() check, to match the
  lines just before it -- seems easier to read in this case.

- Add another set of braces to the zone_watermark_ok logic

From: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>

  Backout one item from a previous "memory page_alloc minor cleanups" patch.
   Until and unless we are certain that no one can ever pass an empty zonelist
  to __alloc_pages(), this check for an empty zonelist (or some BUG
  equivalent) is essential.  The code in get_page_from_freelist() blow ups if
  passed an empty zonelist.
Signed-off-by: NPaul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Acked-by: NChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: NPaul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>