Home nodes [LWN.net]

Home nodes

Posted Apr 6, 2011 20:45 UTC (Wed) by riel (subscriber, #3142)
In reply to: Home nodes by andikleen2
Parent article: Linux Filesystem, Storage, and Memory Management Summit, Day 2

The solutions we tried in the past seem to be "big hammer" style solutions, that try to be fairly rigid in what the kernel is allowed to do.

I want to see how little change we can get away with, and still get a decent performance improvement. A home node would only be the node that memory allocations start on, and that the process is preferentially run on - the CPU scheduler does need to be able to run processes elsewhere temporarily.

Only when a node is permanently overloaded, is it time to move some tasks elsewhere and eventually migrate over some of their memory (maybe with Lee's patches, or something based on them).

My plan is to start small and only add things as needed, trying to stay away from a large, complete & heavy plan.

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Home nodes

Posted Apr 6, 2011 23:13 UTC (Wed) by andikleen2 (guest, #52506) [Link]

Actually the home nodes patches were quite simple.

Good luck reinventing the flat tire.

Home nodes

Posted Apr 6, 2011 23:51 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

While I have no idea if you are right or not, don't you think that attempting to improve where other's have failed is potentially worthy of many tries? Especially if there is no fundamental proof that something won't work? And even more when a real unsolved problem is attempting to be solved?

The analogy to reinventing the wheel is inappropriate, since in the case of a working solution, it is a waste of time to reinvent it. But, in the case of failures, "reinventing it" (and potentially no longer failing), should be praised, not ridiculed, no? (again, with the proof caveat above, and even then some... proofs can sometimes be disproved)