[PATCH v6 5/6] mm/mempolicy: Advertise new MPOL_PREFERRED_MANY

[Feng Tang]

From: Ben Widawsky <ben.widawsky@xxxxxxxxx>

Adds a new mode to the existing mempolicy modes, MPOL_PREFERRED_MANY.

MPOL_PREFERRED_MANY will be adequately documented in the internal
admin-guide with this patch. Eventually, the man pages for mbind(2),
get_mempolicy(2), set_mempolicy(2) and numactl(8) will also have text
about this mode. Those shall contain the canonical reference.

NUMA systems continue to become more prevalent. New technologies like
PMEM make finer grain control over memory access patterns increasingly
desirable. MPOL_PREFERRED_MANY allows userspace to specify a set of
nodes that will be tried first when performing allocations. If those
allocations fail, all remaining nodes will be tried. It's a straight
forward API which solves many of the presumptive needs of system
administrators wanting to optimize workloads on such machines. The mode
will work either per VMA, or per thread.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200630212517.308045-13-ben.widawsky@xxxxxxxxx
Signed-off-by: Ben Widawsky <ben.widawsky@xxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@xxxxxxxxx>
---
 Documentation/admin-guide/mm/numa_memory_policy.rst | 16 ++++++++++++----
 mm/mempolicy.c                                      |  7 +------
 2 files changed, 13 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/numa_memory_policy.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/numa_memory_policy.rst
index 067a90a1499c..cd653561e531 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/numa_memory_policy.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/numa_memory_policy.rst
@@ -245,6 +245,14 @@ MPOL_INTERLEAVED
 	address range or file.  During system boot up, the temporary
 	interleaved system default policy works in this mode.
 
+MPOL_PREFERRED_MANY
+        This mode specifies that the allocation should be attempted from the
+        nodemask specified in the policy. If that allocation fails, the kernel
+        will search other nodes, in order of increasing distance from the first
+        set bit in the nodemask based on information provided by the platform
+        firmware. It is similar to MPOL_PREFERRED with the main exception that
+        is an error to have an empty nodemask.
+
 NUMA memory policy supports the following optional mode flags:
 
 MPOL_F_STATIC_NODES
@@ -253,10 +261,10 @@ MPOL_F_STATIC_NODES
 	nodes changes after the memory policy has been defined.
 
 	Without this flag, any time a mempolicy is rebound because of a
-	change in the set of allowed nodes, the node (Preferred) or
-	nodemask (Bind, Interleave) is remapped to the new set of
-	allowed nodes.  This may result in nodes being used that were
-	previously undesired.
+        change in the set of allowed nodes, the preferred nodemask (Preferred
+        Many), preferred node (Preferred) or nodemask (Bind, Interleave) is
+        remapped to the new set of allowed nodes.  This may result in nodes
+        being used that were previously undesired.
 
 	With this flag, if the user-specified nodes overlap with the
 	nodes allowed by the task's cpuset, then the memory policy is
diff --git a/mm/mempolicy.c b/mm/mempolicy.c
index 93f8789758a7..d90247d6a71b 100644
--- a/mm/mempolicy.c
+++ b/mm/mempolicy.c
@@ -1463,12 +1463,7 @@ static inline int sanitize_mpol_flags(int *mode, unsigned short *flags)
 	*flags = *mode & MPOL_MODE_FLAGS;
 	*mode &= ~MPOL_MODE_FLAGS;
 
-	/*
-	 * The check should be 'mode >= MPOL_MAX', but as 'prefer_many'
-	 * is not fully implemented, don't permit it to be used for now,
-	 * and the logic will be restored in following patch
-	 */
-	if ((unsigned int)(*mode) >=  MPOL_PREFERRED_MANY)
+	if ((unsigned int)(*mode) >=  MPOL_MAX)
 		return -EINVAL;
 	if ((*flags & MPOL_F_STATIC_NODES) && (*flags & MPOL_F_RELATIVE_NODES))
 		return -EINVAL;
-- 
2.7.4