Re: [RFC PATCH 0/10] Another Approach to Use PMEM as NUMA Node

From: Yang Shi
Date: Thu Mar 28 2019 - 14:59:11 EST




On 3/27/19 11:58 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Wed 27-03-19 19:09:10, Yang Shi wrote:
One question, when doing demote and promote we need define a path, for
example, DRAM <-> PMEM (assume two tier memory). When determining what nodes
are "DRAM" nodes, does it make sense to assume the nodes with both cpu and
memory are DRAM nodes since PMEM nodes are typically cpuless nodes?
Do we really have to special case this for PMEM? Why cannot we simply go
in the zonelist order? In other words why cannot we use the same logic
for a larger NUMA machine and instead of swapping simply fallback to a
less contended NUMA node? It can be a regular DRAM, PMEM or whatever
other type of memory node.

Thanks for the suggestion. It makes sense. However, if we don't specialize a pmem node, its fallback node may be a DRAM node, then the memory reclaim may move the inactive page to the DRAM node, it sounds not make too much sense since memory reclaim would prefer to move downwards (DRAM -> PMEM -> Disk).

Yang