[PATCH 0/2] disable NUMA affinity reassignments at runtime

[Nathan Lynch]

Michal Suchánek <msuchanek at suse.de> writes:

> On Thu, 18 Apr 2019 13:56:56 -0500
> Nathan Lynch <nathanl at linux.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
>> Changing cpu <-> node relationships at runtime, as the pseries
>> platform code attempts to do for LPM, PRRN, and VPHN is essentially
>> unsupported by core subsystems. [1]
>
> Wasn't there a patch that solves the discrepancy by removing and
> re-adding the updated CPUs?
>
> http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/1051761/

In our testing it seems that changing the result of cpu_to_node() for a
given cpu id, even with an intervening offline/online, leads to crashes
and assertions in the slab allocator. There have been some ideas floated
to sidestep that but I think there are larger issues to consider.

Even if changing CPU node assignments were possible to do without
destabilizing the system it's not all that useful without updating
memory/LMB affinity as well. (VPHN is an exception.)

Furthermore I'm not aware of any effort to make the numa/affinity APIs
at the system call level account for the possibility that the cpu/mem
<-> node relationship could be dynamic. Nor is there any facility for
notifying applications of changes. Even if the kernel were to properly
support this internally, NUMA-aware applications are the ones that will
suffer unless appropriate APIs are provided to them.

To me it seems this all needs more careful consideration and work, and
much of it should happen outside of this particular arch/platform
context.