[PATCH] Swap Migration V5: sys_migrate_pages interface

sys_migrate_pages implementation using swap based page migration

This is the original API proposed by Ray Bryant in his posts during the first
half of 2005 on linux-mm@kvack.org and linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org.

The intent of sys_migrate is to migrate memory of a process.  A process may
have migrated to another node.  Memory was allocated optimally for the prior
context.  sys_migrate_pages allows to shift the memory to the new node.

sys_migrate_pages is also useful if the processes available memory nodes have
changed through cpuset operations to manually move the processes memory.  Paul
Jackson is working on an automated mechanism that will allow an automatic
migration if the cpuset of a process is changed.  However, a user may decide
to manually control the migration.

This implementation is put into the policy layer since it uses concepts and
functions that are also needed for mbind and friends.  The patch also provides
a do_migrate_pages function that may be useful for cpusets to automatically
move memory.  sys_migrate_pages does not modify policies in contrast to Ray's
implementation.

The current code here is based on the swap based page migration capability and
thus is not able to preserve the physical layout relative to it containing
nodeset (which may be a cpuset).  When direct page migration becomes available
then the implementation needs to be changed to do a isomorphic move of pages
between different nodesets.  The current implementation simply evicts all
pages in source nodeset that are not in the target nodeset.

Patch supports ia64, i386 and x86_64.

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