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Date:   Wed, 2 Nov 2022 08:51:37 +0100
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
To:     "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
Cc:     Bharata B Rao <bharata@amd.com>,
        Aneesh Kumar K V <aneesh.kumar@linux.ibm.com>,
        linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Alistair Popple <apopple@nvidia.com>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>,
        Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>,
        Hesham Almatary <hesham.almatary@huawei.com>,
        Jagdish Gediya <jvgediya.oss@gmail.com>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
        Jonathan Cameron <Jonathan.Cameron@huawei.com>,
        Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@intel.com>, Wei Xu <weixugc@google.com>,
        Yang Shi <shy828301@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] memory tiering: use small chunk size and more tiers
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On Wed 02-11-22 08:39:49, Huang, Ying wrote:
> Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> writes:
> 
> > On Mon 31-10-22 09:33:49, Huang, Ying wrote:
> > [...]
> >> In the upstream implementation, 4 tiers are possible below DRAM.  That's
> >> enough for now.  But in the long run, it may be better to define more.
> >> 100 possible tiers below DRAM may be too extreme.
> >
> > I am just curious. Is any configurations with more than couple of tiers
> > even manageable? I mean applications have been struggling even with
> > regular NUMA systems for years and vast majority of them is largerly
> > NUMA unaware. How are they going to configure for a more complex system
> > when a) there is no resource access control so whatever you aim for
> > might not be available and b) in which situations there is going to be a
> > demand only for subset of tears (GPU memory?) ?
> 
> Sorry for confusing.  I think that there are only several (less than 10)
> tiers in a system in practice.  Yes, here, I suggested to define 100 (10
> in the later text) POSSIBLE tiers below DRAM.  My intention isn't to
> manage a system with tens memory tiers.  Instead, my intention is to
> avoid to put 2 memory types into one memory tier by accident via make
> the abstract distance range of each memory tier as small as possible.
> More possible memory tiers, smaller abstract distance range of each
> memory tier.

TBH I do not really understand how tweaking ranges helps anything.
IIUC drivers are free to assign any abstract distance so they will clash
without any higher level coordination.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs