[PATCH] mm: add noaliencache boot option to disable numa alien caches
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: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
diff --git a/mm/slab.c b/mm/slab.c
index 3318252..bfd654c 100644
--- a/mm/slab.c
+++ b/mm/slab.c
@@ -869,6 +869,22 @@
dump_stack();
}
+/*
+ * By default on NUMA we use alien caches to stage the freeing of
+ * objects allocated from other nodes. This causes massive memory
+ * inefficiencies when using fake NUMA setup to split memory into a
+ * large number of small nodes, so it can be disabled on the command
+ * line
+ */
+
+static int use_alien_caches __read_mostly = 1;
+static int __init noaliencache_setup(char *s)
+{
+ use_alien_caches = 0;
+ return 1;
+}
+__setup("noaliencache", noaliencache_setup);
+
#ifdef CONFIG_NUMA
/*
* Special reaping functions for NUMA systems called from cache_reap().
@@ -1117,7 +1133,7 @@
* Make sure we are not freeing a object from another node to the array
* cache on this cpu.
*/
- if (likely(slabp->nodeid == node))
+ if (likely(slabp->nodeid == node) || unlikely(!use_alien_caches))
return 0;
l3 = cachep->nodelists[node];
@@ -1195,7 +1211,7 @@
list_for_each_entry(cachep, &cache_chain, next) {
struct array_cache *nc;
struct array_cache *shared;
- struct array_cache **alien;
+ struct array_cache **alien = NULL;
nc = alloc_arraycache(node, cachep->limit,
cachep->batchcount);
@@ -1207,9 +1223,11 @@
if (!shared)
goto bad;
- alien = alloc_alien_cache(node, cachep->limit);
- if (!alien)
- goto bad;
+ if (use_alien_caches) {
+ alien = alloc_alien_cache(node, cachep->limit);
+ if (!alien)
+ goto bad;
+ }
cachep->array[cpu] = nc;
l3 = cachep->nodelists[node];
BUG_ON(!l3);
@@ -3590,13 +3608,15 @@
int node;
struct kmem_list3 *l3;
struct array_cache *new_shared;
- struct array_cache **new_alien;
+ struct array_cache **new_alien = NULL;
for_each_online_node(node) {
- new_alien = alloc_alien_cache(node, cachep->limit);
- if (!new_alien)
- goto fail;
+ if (use_alien_caches) {
+ new_alien = alloc_alien_cache(node, cachep->limit);
+ if (!new_alien)
+ goto fail;
+ }
new_shared = alloc_arraycache(node,
cachep->shared*cachep->batchcount,