[PATCH] Fake NUMA emulation for PowerPC

[Kumar Gala]

On Dec 7, 2007, at 4:12 PM, Balbir Singh wrote:

> Kumar Gala wrote:
>>
>> On Dec 7, 2007, at 3:35 PM, Balbir Singh wrote:
>>
>>> Olof Johansson wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 02:44:25AM +0530, Balbir Singh wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Comments are as always welcome!
>>>>
>>>> Care to explain what this is useful for? (Not saying it's a  
>>>> stupid idea,
>>>> just wondering what the reason for doing it is).
>>>>
>>>
>>> In my case, I use it to test parts of my memory controller patches  
>>> on an
>>> emulated NUMA machine. I plan to use it to test out page migration
>>> across nodes.
>>
>> Can you explain that further.  I'm still not clear on why this is  
>> useful.
>>
>> - k
>
> Sure. In my case I need to emulate NUMA nodes to do some NUMA specific
> testing. The memory controller I've written has some interesting data
> structures like per node, per zone LRU lists. To be able to test those
> features on a non-numa box is a problem, since we get just the  
> default node.

Maybe I'm missing something, what do you mean by memory controller  
you've written?  (I'm use to the term 'memory controller' meaning the  
actual RAM control).

> To be able to test the memory controller under NUMA, I use fake NUMA
> nodes. x86-64 has a similar feature, the code I have here is the
> simplest I could come up with for PowerPC.
>
> I just thought of another very interesting use case, it can be used to
> split up the zone's lru lock which is highly contended.

- k