[PATCH] Enable hashdist by default on 64bit NUMA

Anton Blanchard anton at samba.org
Thu Feb 26 22:24:32 EST 2009


Hi David,
 
> Hmmm... my bad, I think you need to keep the CONFIG_NUMA
> there too as there is a TLB usage penalty for non-NUMA
> systems if you only use CONFIG_64BIT there.

Sorry that was my screwup, here's a fixed version.

Anton

--

On PowerPC we allocate large boot time hashes on node 0. This leads to
an imbalance in the free memory, for example on a 64GB box (4 x 16GB
nodes):

Free memory:
Node 0: 97.03%
Node 1: 98.54%
Node 2: 98.42%
Node 3: 98.53%

If we switch to using vmalloc (like ia64 and x86-64) things are more
balanced:

Free memory:
Node 0: 97.53%
Node 1: 98.35%
Node 2: 98.33%
Node 3: 98.33%

For many HPC applications we are limited by the free available memory on
the smallest node, so even though the same amount of memory is used the
better balancing helps.

Since all 64bit NUMA capable architectures should have sufficient
vmalloc space, it makes sense to enable it via CONFIG_64BIT.

Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton at samba.org>
---

diff --git a/include/linux/bootmem.h b/include/linux/bootmem.h
index 95837bf..0c4d4b7 100644
--- a/include/linux/bootmem.h
+++ b/include/linux/bootmem.h
@@ -144,10 +144,10 @@ extern void *alloc_large_system_hash(const char *tablename,
 
 #define HASH_EARLY	0x00000001	/* Allocating during early boot? */
 
-/* Only NUMA needs hash distribution.
- * IA64 and x86_64 have sufficient vmalloc space.
+/* Only NUMA needs hash distribution. 64bit NUMA architectures have
+ * sufficient vmalloc space.
  */
-#if defined(CONFIG_NUMA) && (defined(CONFIG_IA64) || defined(CONFIG_X86_64))
+#if defined(CONFIG_NUMA) && defined(CONFIG_64BIT)
 #define HASHDIST_DEFAULT 1
 #else
 #define HASHDIST_DEFAULT 0



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