ksm: allow trees per NUMA node

Here's a KSM series, based on mmotm 2013-01-23-17-04: starting with
Petr's v7 "KSM: numa awareness sysfs knob"; then fixing the two issues
we had with that, fully enabling KSM page migration on the way.

(A different kind of KSM/NUMA issue which I've certainly not begun to
address here: when KSM pages are unmerged, there's usually no sense in
preferring to allocate the new pages local to the caller's node.)

This patch:

Introduces new sysfs boolean knob /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/merge_across_nodes
which control merging pages across different numa nodes.  When it is set
to zero only pages from the same node are merged, otherwise pages from
all nodes can be merged together (default behavior).

Typical use-case could be a lot of KVM guests on NUMA machine and cpus
from more distant nodes would have significant increase of access
latency to the merged ksm page.  Sysfs knob was choosen for higher
variability when some users still prefers higher amount of saved
physical memory regardless of access latency.

Every numa node has its own stable & unstable trees because of faster
searching and inserting.  Changing of merge_across_nodes value is
possible only when there are not any ksm shared pages in system.

I've tested this patch on numa machines with 2, 4 and 8 nodes and
measured speed of memory access inside of KVM guests with memory pinned
to one of nodes with this benchmark:

  http://pholasek.fedorapeople.org/alloc_pg.c

Population standard deviations of access times in percentage of average
were following:

merge_across_nodes=1
2 nodes 1.4%
4 nodes 1.6%
8 nodes	1.7%

merge_across_nodes=0
2 nodes	1%
4 nodes	0.32%
8 nodes	0.018%

RFC: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/30/91
v1: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/23/46
v2: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/29/105
v3: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/9/14/550
v4: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/9/23/137
v5: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/10/540
v6: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/154
v7: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/27/225

Hugh notes that this patch brings two problems, whose solution needs
further support in mm/ksm.c, which follows in subsequent patches:

1) switching merge_across_nodes after running KSM is liable to oops
   on stale nodes still left over from the previous stable tree;

2) memory hotremove may migrate KSM pages, but there is no provision
   here for !merge_across_nodes to migrate nodes to the proper tree.

Signed-off-by: Petr Holasek <pholasek@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Izik Eidus <izik.eidus@ravellosystems.com>
Cc: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@de.ibm.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
index b392e496f816..25cc89ba811b 100644
--- a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
@@ -58,6 +58,13 @@ sleep_millisecs  - how many milliseconds ksmd should sleep before next scan
                    e.g. "echo 20 > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/sleep_millisecs"
                    Default: 20 (chosen for demonstration purposes)
 
+merge_across_nodes - specifies if pages from different numa nodes can be merged.
+                   When set to 0, ksm merges only pages which physically
+                   reside in the memory area of same NUMA node. It brings
+                   lower latency to access to shared page. Value can be
+                   changed only when there is no ksm shared pages in system.
+                   Default: 1
+
 run              - set 0 to stop ksmd from running but keep merged pages,
                    set 1 to run ksmd e.g. "echo 1 > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run",
                    set 2 to stop ksmd and unmerge all pages currently merged,