[PATCH] Add tmpfs options for memory placement policies

Anything that writes into a tmpfs filesystem is liable to disproportionately
decrease the available memory on a particular node.  Since there's no telling
what sort of application (e.g.  dd/cp/cat) might be dropping large files
there, this lets the admin choose the appropriate default behavior for their
site's situation.

Introduce a tmpfs mount option which allows specifying a memory policy and
a second option to specify the nodelist for that policy.  With the default
policy, tmpfs will behave as it does today.  This patch adds support for
preferred, bind, and interleave policies.

The default policy will cause pages to be added to tmpfs files on the node
which is doing the writing.  Some jobs expect a single process to create
and manage the tmpfs files.  This results in a node which has a
significantly reduced number of free pages.

With this patch, the administrator can specify the policy and nodes for
that policy where they would prefer allocations.

This patch was originally written by Brent Casavant and Hugh Dickins.  I
added support for the bind and preferred policies and the mpol_nodelist
mount option.

Signed-off-by: Brent Casavant <bcasavan@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Robin Holt <holt@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt
index 0d783c504ead..dbe4d87d2615 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt
@@ -78,6 +78,18 @@ use up all the memory on the machine; but enhances the scalability of
 that instance in a system with many cpus making intensive use of it.
 
 
+tmpfs has a mount option to set the NUMA memory allocation policy for
+all files in that instance:
+mpol=interleave         prefers to allocate memory from each node in turn
+mpol=default            prefers to allocate memory from the local node
+mpol=bind               prefers to allocate from mpol_nodelist
+mpol=preferred          prefers to allocate from first node in mpol_nodelist
+
+The following mount option is used in conjunction with mpol=interleave,
+mpol=bind or mpol=preferred:
+mpol_nodelist:  nodelist suitable for parsing with nodelist_parse.
+
+
 To specify the initial root directory you can use the following mount
 options: