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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt | 18 |
1 files changed, 9 insertions, 9 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt b/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt index bad16d3f6a4..badb0507608 100644 --- a/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt +++ b/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt @@ -8,7 +8,8 @@ The current memory policy support was added to Linux 2.6 around May 2004. This document attempts to describe the concepts and APIs of the 2.6 memory policy support. -Memory policies should not be confused with cpusets (Documentation/cpusets.txt) +Memory policies should not be confused with cpusets +(Documentation/cgroups/cpusets.txt) which is an administrative mechanism for restricting the nodes from which memory may be allocated by a set of processes. Memory policies are a programming interface that a NUMA-aware application can take advantage of. When @@ -44,7 +45,7 @@ most general to most specific: to establish the task policy for a child task exec()'d from an executable image that has no awareness of memory policy. See the MEMORY POLICY APIS section, below, for an overview of the system call - that a task may use to set/change it's task/process policy. + that a task may use to set/change its task/process policy. In a multi-threaded task, task policies apply only to the thread [Linux kernel task] that installs the policy and any threads @@ -58,7 +59,7 @@ most general to most specific: the policy at the time they were allocated. VMA Policy: A "VMA" or "Virtual Memory Area" refers to a range of a task's - virtual adddress space. A task may define a specific policy for a range + virtual address space. A task may define a specific policy for a range of its virtual address space. See the MEMORY POLICIES APIS section, below, for an overview of the mbind() system call used to set a VMA policy. @@ -173,7 +174,6 @@ Components of Memory Policies allocation fails, the kernel will search other nodes, in order of increasing distance from the preferred node based on information provided by the platform firmware. - containing the cpu where the allocation takes place. Internally, the Preferred policy uses a single node--the preferred_node member of struct mempolicy. When the internal @@ -274,9 +274,9 @@ Components of Memory Policies For example, consider a task that is attached to a cpuset with mems 2-5 that sets an Interleave policy over the same set with MPOL_F_RELATIVE_NODES. If the cpuset's mems change to 3-7, the - interleave now occurs over nodes 3,5-6. If the cpuset's mems + interleave now occurs over nodes 3,5-7. If the cpuset's mems then change to 0,2-3,5, then the interleave occurs over nodes - 0,3,5. + 0,2-3,5. Thanks to the consistent remapping, applications preparing nodemasks to specify memory policies using this flag should @@ -300,7 +300,7 @@ decrement this reference count, respectively. mpol_put() will only free the structure back to the mempolicy kmem cache when the reference count goes to zero. -When a new memory policy is allocated, it's reference count is initialized +When a new memory policy is allocated, its reference count is initialized to '1', representing the reference held by the task that is installing the new policy. When a pointer to a memory policy structure is stored in another structure, another reference is added, as the task's reference will be dropped @@ -353,7 +353,7 @@ follows: Because of this extra reference counting, and because we must lookup shared policies in a tree structure under spinlock, shared policies are - more expensive to use in the page allocation path. This is expecially + more expensive to use in the page allocation path. This is especially true for shared policies on shared memory regions shared by tasks running on different NUMA nodes. This extra overhead can be avoided by always falling back to task or system default policy for shared memory regions, @@ -423,7 +423,7 @@ a command line tool, numactl(8), exists that allows one to: + set the shared policy for a shared memory segment via mbind(2) -The numactl(8) tool is packages with the run-time version of the library +The numactl(8) tool is packaged with the run-time version of the library containing the memory policy system call wrappers. Some distributions package the headers and compile-time libraries in a separate development package. |