[PATCH] Zone reclaim: Reclaim logic

Some bits for zone reclaim exists in 2.6.15 but they are not usable.  This
patch fixes them up, removes unused code and makes zone reclaim usable.

Zone reclaim allows the reclaiming of pages from a zone if the number of
free pages falls below the watermarks even if other zones still have enough
pages available.  Zone reclaim is of particular importance for NUMA
machines.  It can be more beneficial to reclaim a page than taking the
performance penalties that come with allocating a page on a remote zone.

Zone reclaim is enabled if the maximum distance to another node is higher
than RECLAIM_DISTANCE, which may be defined by an arch.  By default
RECLAIM_DISTANCE is 20.  20 is the distance to another node in the same
component (enclosure or motherboard) on IA64.  The meaning of the NUMA
distance information seems to vary by arch.

If zone reclaim is not successful then no further reclaim attempts will
occur for a certain time period (ZONE_RECLAIM_INTERVAL).

This patch was discussed before. See

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113519961504207&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113408418232531&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113389027420032&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113380938612205&w=2

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/topology.h b/include/linux/topology.h
index 315a5163d6a0..e8eb0040ce3a 100644
--- a/include/linux/topology.h
+++ b/include/linux/topology.h
@@ -56,6 +56,14 @@
 #define REMOTE_DISTANCE         20
 #define node_distance(from,to)  ((from) == (to) ? LOCAL_DISTANCE : REMOTE_DISTANCE)
 #endif
+#ifndef RECLAIM_DISTANCE
+/*
+ * If the distance between nodes in a system is larger than RECLAIM_DISTANCE
+ * (in whatever arch specific measurement units returned by node_distance())
+ * then switch on zone reclaim on boot.
+ */
+#define RECLAIM_DISTANCE 20
+#endif
 #ifndef PENALTY_FOR_NODE_WITH_CPUS
 #define PENALTY_FOR_NODE_WITH_CPUS      (1)
 #endif