Handling NUMA page migration

[Frank Mehnert <frank.mehnert@oracle.com>]

Hi,

our memory management on Linux hosts conflicts with NUMA page migration.
I assume this problem existed for a longer time but Linux 3.8 introduced
automatic NUMA page balancing which makes the problem visible on
multi-node hosts leading to kernel oopses.

NUMA page migration means that the physical address of a page changes.
This is fatal if the application assumes that this never happens for
that page as it was supposed to be pinned.

We have two kind of pinned memory:

A) 1. allocate memory in userland with mmap()
   2. madvise(MADV_DONTFORK)
   3. pin with get_user_pages().
   4. flush dcache_page()
   5. vm_flags |= (VM_DONTCOPY | VM_LOCKED)
      (resulting flags are VM_MIXEDMAP | VM_DONTDUMP | VM_DONTEXPAND |
       VM_DONTCOPY | VM_LOCKED | 0xff)

B) 1. allocate memory with alloc_pages()
   2. SetPageReserved()
   3. vm_mmap() to allocate a userspace mapping
   4. vm_insert_page()
   5. vm_flags |= (VM_DONTEXPAND | VM_DONTDUMP)
      (resulting flags are VM_MIXEDMAP | VM_DONTDUMP | VM_DONTEXPAND | 0xff)

At least the memory allocated like B) is affected by automatic NUMA page
migration. I'm not sure about A).

1. How can I prevent automatic NUMA page migration on this memory?
2. Can NUMA page migration also be handled on such kind of memory without
   preventing migration?

Thanks,

Frank
-- 
Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert | Software Development Director, VirtualBox
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