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Linux Gains Support for NUMA

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the big-iron-at-your-hip dept.

soosterh writes "CNet has an article about a NUMA patch from IBM. It says that the improvement adds some support in Linux for nonuniform memory access, or NUMA, a design for higher-end servers with many processors. Linus Torvalds, the original creator of the operating system and still its top authority, accepted the update this month into version 2.5, the current test version of the software."

6 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. And AMD... by addaon · · Score: 5, Informative

    And, of course, also support for the Hammer architecture, which is (smaller scale) NUMA. Each processor in an x86-64 system has its own memory bus, so time to access memory depends on whether the memory is directly connected to a given processor, or whether another processor needs to mediate, the definition of NUMA.

    --

    I've had this sig for three days.
  2. NUMA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    NUMA
    Short for Non-Uniform Memory Access, a type of parallel processing architecture in which each processor has its own local memory but can also access memory owned by other processors. It's called non-uniform because the memory access times are faster when a processor accesses its own memory than when it borrows memory from another processor.

    NUMA computers offer the scalability of MPP and the programming ease of SMP.
  3. Re:What about the feature freeze? by greppling · · Score: 5, Informative
    The NUMA-aware scheduler was merged recently despite the feauture freeze. The patch was considered non-intrusive (and safe for non-NUMA architectures). Feature freeze is not code freeze.

    See the good discussion in the LWN article on this topic.

  4. One learns something new every day by Bemmu · · Score: 5, Funny

    Thank you for explaining who Linus Torvalds is.

  5. Re:Linux lacks democracy by gilesjuk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You underestimate the intelligence of Linus, he initially refused the NUMA patch as it affected performance on non NUMA systems. So the author of the patch got some help with it and the patch now works without hindering non NUMA systems.

    Surely this is quality control at its finest? every project has its project manager. Everyone is free to write their own applications without Linus controlling them, he just looks after his project which happens to be the kernel. Without strict quality control the kernel would be a right old dogs dinner by now.

  6. Recent Patch Modification by LJPeixoto · · Score: 5, Informative

    "More recently, the NUMA scheduler patch has been reworked (by Martin Bligh, Erich Focht, Michael Hohnbaum, and others) around a simple observation: most of the NUMA problems can be solved by simply restricting the current scheduler's balancing code to processors within a single node. If the rebalancer - which moves processes across CPUs in order to keep them all busy - only balances inside a node, the worst processor imbalances will be addressed without moving processes into a foreign-node slow zone. A simple (three-line) patch which did nothing but add the within-node restriction yielded most of the benefits of the full NUMA scheduler; indeed, it performed better on some benchmarks. Real-world loads, however, will require a scheduler which can distribute processes evenly across nodes. Occasionally it is necessary, even, to move processes to a slower node; a lot of CPU time on a lightly-loaded node will give better performance than waiting in the run queue on a heavily-loaded node. So a bit of complexity had to be added back into the new scheduler to complete the job."

    Extracted from:
    http://lwn.net/Articles/20741/