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Date:   Tue, 9 Oct 2018 16:16:38 +0100
From:   Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc:     David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>,
        Andrea Argangeli <andrea@kernel.org>,
        Zi Yan <zi.yan@cs.rutgers.edu>,
        Stefan Priebe - Profihost AG <s.priebe@profihost.ag>,
        "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Stable tree <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: thp:  relax __GFP_THISNODE for MADV_HUGEPAGE
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On Tue, Oct 09, 2018 at 04:25:10PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Tue 09-10-18 14:00:34, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 09, 2018 at 02:27:45PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > [Sorry for being slow in responding but I was mostly offline last few
> > >  days]
> > > 
> > > On Tue 09-10-18 10:48:25, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > > This goes back to my point that the MADV_HUGEPAGE hint should not make
> > > > promises about locality and that introducing MADV_LOCAL for specialised
> > > > libraries may be more appropriate with the initial semantic being how it
> > > > treats MADV_HUGEPAGE regions.
> > > 
> > > I agree with your other points and not going to repeat them. I am not
> > > sure madvise s the best API for the purpose though. We are talking about
> > > memory policy here and there is an existing api for that so I would
> > > _prefer_ to reuse it for this purpose.
> > > 
> > 
> > I flip-flopped on that one in my head multiple times on the basis of
> > how strict it should be. Memory policies tend to be black or white --
> > bind here, interleave there, etc. It wasn't clear to me what the best
> > policy would be to describe "allocate local as best as you can but allow
> > fallbacks if necessary".
> 
> I was thinking about MPOL_NODE_PROXIMITY with the following semantic:
> - try hard to allocate from a local or very close numa node(s) even when
> that requires expensive operations like the memory reclaim/compaction
> before falling back to other more distant numa nodes.
> 

Seems reasonable. It's not far from the general semantics I thought
MADV_LOCAL would have.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs