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-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/.gitignore2
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/00-INDEX40
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/active_mm.txt83
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/balance93
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/cleancache.txt277
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/frontswap.txt278
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/highmem.txt162
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt335
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/hwpoison.txt187
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt97
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/numa149
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt452
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting80
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/page_migration149
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/page_owner.txt81
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt161
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.txt27
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/slub.txt283
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt43
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/split_page_table_lock94
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt387
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/unevictable-lru.txt688
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt70
-rw-r--r--kernel/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt68
24 files changed, 4286 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/.gitignore b/kernel/Documentation/vm/.gitignore
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..09b164a57
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/.gitignore
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+page-types
+slabinfo
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/00-INDEX b/kernel/Documentation/vm/00-INDEX
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..081c49777
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/00-INDEX
@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+00-INDEX
+ - this file.
+active_mm.txt
+ - An explanation from Linus about tsk->active_mm vs tsk->mm.
+balance
+ - various information on memory balancing.
+cleancache.txt
+ - Intro to cleancache and page-granularity victim cache.
+frontswap.txt
+ - Outline frontswap, part of the transcendent memory frontend.
+highmem.txt
+ - Outline of highmem and common issues.
+hugetlbpage.txt
+ - a brief summary of hugetlbpage support in the Linux kernel.
+hwpoison.txt
+ - explains what hwpoison is
+ksm.txt
+ - how to use the Kernel Samepage Merging feature.
+numa
+ - information about NUMA specific code in the Linux vm.
+numa_memory_policy.txt
+ - documentation of concepts and APIs of the 2.6 memory policy support.
+overcommit-accounting
+ - description of the Linux kernels overcommit handling modes.
+page_migration
+ - description of page migration in NUMA systems.
+pagemap.txt
+ - pagemap, from the userspace perspective
+slub.txt
+ - a short users guide for SLUB.
+soft-dirty.txt
+ - short explanation for soft-dirty PTEs
+split_page_table_lock
+ - Separate per-table lock to improve scalability of the old page_table_lock.
+transhuge.txt
+ - Transparent Hugepage Support, alternative way of using hugepages.
+unevictable-lru.txt
+ - Unevictable LRU infrastructure
+zswap.txt
+ - Intro to compressed cache for swap pages
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/active_mm.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/active_mm.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..dbf458174
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/active_mm.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
+List: linux-kernel
+Subject: Re: active_mm
+From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds () transmeta ! com>
+Date: 1999-07-30 21:36:24
+
+Cc'd to linux-kernel, because I don't write explanations all that often,
+and when I do I feel better about more people reading them.
+
+On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, David Mosberger wrote:
+>
+> Is there a brief description someplace on how "mm" vs. "active_mm" in
+> the task_struct are supposed to be used? (My apologies if this was
+> discussed on the mailing lists---I just returned from vacation and
+> wasn't able to follow linux-kernel for a while).
+
+Basically, the new setup is:
+
+ - we have "real address spaces" and "anonymous address spaces". The
+ difference is that an anonymous address space doesn't care about the
+ user-level page tables at all, so when we do a context switch into an
+ anonymous address space we just leave the previous address space
+ active.
+
+ The obvious use for a "anonymous address space" is any thread that
+ doesn't need any user mappings - all kernel threads basically fall into
+ this category, but even "real" threads can temporarily say that for
+ some amount of time they are not going to be interested in user space,
+ and that the scheduler might as well try to avoid wasting time on
+ switching the VM state around. Currently only the old-style bdflush
+ sync does that.
+
+ - "tsk->mm" points to the "real address space". For an anonymous process,
+ tsk->mm will be NULL, for the logical reason that an anonymous process
+ really doesn't _have_ a real address space at all.
+
+ - however, we obviously need to keep track of which address space we
+ "stole" for such an anonymous user. For that, we have "tsk->active_mm",
+ which shows what the currently active address space is.
+
+ The rule is that for a process with a real address space (ie tsk->mm is
+ non-NULL) the active_mm obviously always has to be the same as the real
+ one.
+
+ For a anonymous process, tsk->mm == NULL, and tsk->active_mm is the
+ "borrowed" mm while the anonymous process is running. When the
+ anonymous process gets scheduled away, the borrowed address space is
+ returned and cleared.
+
+To support all that, the "struct mm_struct" now has two counters: a
+"mm_users" counter that is how many "real address space users" there are,
+and a "mm_count" counter that is the number of "lazy" users (ie anonymous
+users) plus one if there are any real users.
+
+Usually there is at least one real user, but it could be that the real
+user exited on another CPU while a lazy user was still active, so you do
+actually get cases where you have a address space that is _only_ used by
+lazy users. That is often a short-lived state, because once that thread
+gets scheduled away in favour of a real thread, the "zombie" mm gets
+released because "mm_users" becomes zero.
+
+Also, a new rule is that _nobody_ ever has "init_mm" as a real MM any
+more. "init_mm" should be considered just a "lazy context when no other
+context is available", and in fact it is mainly used just at bootup when
+no real VM has yet been created. So code that used to check
+
+ if (current->mm == &init_mm)
+
+should generally just do
+
+ if (!current->mm)
+
+instead (which makes more sense anyway - the test is basically one of "do
+we have a user context", and is generally done by the page fault handler
+and things like that).
+
+Anyway, I put a pre-patch-2.3.13-1 on ftp.kernel.org just a moment ago,
+because it slightly changes the interfaces to accommodate the alpha (who
+would have thought it, but the alpha actually ends up having one of the
+ugliest context switch codes - unlike the other architectures where the MM
+and register state is separate, the alpha PALcode joins the two, and you
+need to switch both together).
+
+(From http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=93337278602211&w=2)
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/balance b/kernel/Documentation/vm/balance
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..c46e68cf9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/balance
@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+Started Jan 2000 by Kanoj Sarcar <kanoj@sgi.com>
+
+Memory balancing is needed for non __GFP_WAIT as well as for non
+__GFP_IO allocations.
+
+There are two reasons to be requesting non __GFP_WAIT allocations:
+the caller can not sleep (typically intr context), or does not want
+to incur cost overheads of page stealing and possible swap io for
+whatever reasons.
+
+__GFP_IO allocation requests are made to prevent file system deadlocks.
+
+In the absence of non sleepable allocation requests, it seems detrimental
+to be doing balancing. Page reclamation can be kicked off lazily, that
+is, only when needed (aka zone free memory is 0), instead of making it
+a proactive process.
+
+That being said, the kernel should try to fulfill requests for direct
+mapped pages from the direct mapped pool, instead of falling back on
+the dma pool, so as to keep the dma pool filled for dma requests (atomic
+or not). A similar argument applies to highmem and direct mapped pages.
+OTOH, if there is a lot of free dma pages, it is preferable to satisfy
+regular memory requests by allocating one from the dma pool, instead
+of incurring the overhead of regular zone balancing.
+
+In 2.2, memory balancing/page reclamation would kick off only when the
+_total_ number of free pages fell below 1/64 th of total memory. With the
+right ratio of dma and regular memory, it is quite possible that balancing
+would not be done even when the dma zone was completely empty. 2.2 has
+been running production machines of varying memory sizes, and seems to be
+doing fine even with the presence of this problem. In 2.3, due to
+HIGHMEM, this problem is aggravated.
+
+In 2.3, zone balancing can be done in one of two ways: depending on the
+zone size (and possibly of the size of lower class zones), we can decide
+at init time how many free pages we should aim for while balancing any
+zone. The good part is, while balancing, we do not need to look at sizes
+of lower class zones, the bad part is, we might do too frequent balancing
+due to ignoring possibly lower usage in the lower class zones. Also,
+with a slight change in the allocation routine, it is possible to reduce
+the memclass() macro to be a simple equality.
+
+Another possible solution is that we balance only when the free memory
+of a zone _and_ all its lower class zones falls below 1/64th of the
+total memory in the zone and its lower class zones. This fixes the 2.2
+balancing problem, and stays as close to 2.2 behavior as possible. Also,
+the balancing algorithm works the same way on the various architectures,
+which have different numbers and types of zones. If we wanted to get
+fancy, we could assign different weights to free pages in different
+zones in the future.
+
+Note that if the size of the regular zone is huge compared to dma zone,
+it becomes less significant to consider the free dma pages while
+deciding whether to balance the regular zone. The first solution
+becomes more attractive then.
+
+The appended patch implements the second solution. It also "fixes" two
+problems: first, kswapd is woken up as in 2.2 on low memory conditions
+for non-sleepable allocations. Second, the HIGHMEM zone is also balanced,
+so as to give a fighting chance for replace_with_highmem() to get a
+HIGHMEM page, as well as to ensure that HIGHMEM allocations do not
+fall back into regular zone. This also makes sure that HIGHMEM pages
+are not leaked (for example, in situations where a HIGHMEM page is in
+the swapcache but is not being used by anyone)
+
+kswapd also needs to know about the zones it should balance. kswapd is
+primarily needed in a situation where balancing can not be done,
+probably because all allocation requests are coming from intr context
+and all process contexts are sleeping. For 2.3, kswapd does not really
+need to balance the highmem zone, since intr context does not request
+highmem pages. kswapd looks at the zone_wake_kswapd field in the zone
+structure to decide whether a zone needs balancing.
+
+Page stealing from process memory and shm is done if stealing the page would
+alleviate memory pressure on any zone in the page's node that has fallen below
+its watermark.
+
+watemark[WMARK_MIN/WMARK_LOW/WMARK_HIGH]/low_on_memory/zone_wake_kswapd: These
+are per-zone fields, used to determine when a zone needs to be balanced. When
+the number of pages falls below watermark[WMARK_MIN], the hysteric field
+low_on_memory gets set. This stays set till the number of free pages becomes
+watermark[WMARK_HIGH]. When low_on_memory is set, page allocation requests will
+try to free some pages in the zone (providing GFP_WAIT is set in the request).
+Orthogonal to this, is the decision to poke kswapd to free some zone pages.
+That decision is not hysteresis based, and is done when the number of free
+pages is below watermark[WMARK_LOW]; in which case zone_wake_kswapd is also set.
+
+
+(Good) Ideas that I have heard:
+1. Dynamic experience should influence balancing: number of failed requests
+for a zone can be tracked and fed into the balancing scheme (jalvo@mbay.net)
+2. Implement a replace_with_highmem()-like replace_with_regular() to preserve
+dma pages. (lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk)
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/cleancache.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/cleancache.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..e4b49df7a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/cleancache.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,277 @@
+MOTIVATION
+
+Cleancache is a new optional feature provided by the VFS layer that
+potentially dramatically increases page cache effectiveness for
+many workloads in many environments at a negligible cost.
+
+Cleancache can be thought of as a page-granularity victim cache for clean
+pages that the kernel's pageframe replacement algorithm (PFRA) would like
+to keep around, but can't since there isn't enough memory. So when the
+PFRA "evicts" a page, it first attempts to use cleancache code to
+put the data contained in that page into "transcendent memory", memory
+that is not directly accessible or addressable by the kernel and is
+of unknown and possibly time-varying size.
+
+Later, when a cleancache-enabled filesystem wishes to access a page
+in a file on disk, it first checks cleancache to see if it already
+contains it; if it does, the page of data is copied into the kernel
+and a disk access is avoided.
+
+Transcendent memory "drivers" for cleancache are currently implemented
+in Xen (using hypervisor memory) and zcache (using in-kernel compressed
+memory) and other implementations are in development.
+
+FAQs are included below.
+
+IMPLEMENTATION OVERVIEW
+
+A cleancache "backend" that provides transcendent memory registers itself
+to the kernel's cleancache "frontend" by calling cleancache_register_ops,
+passing a pointer to a cleancache_ops structure with funcs set appropriately.
+The functions provided must conform to certain semantics as follows:
+
+Most important, cleancache is "ephemeral". Pages which are copied into
+cleancache have an indefinite lifetime which is completely unknowable
+by the kernel and so may or may not still be in cleancache at any later time.
+Thus, as its name implies, cleancache is not suitable for dirty pages.
+Cleancache has complete discretion over what pages to preserve and what
+pages to discard and when.
+
+Mounting a cleancache-enabled filesystem should call "init_fs" to obtain a
+pool id which, if positive, must be saved in the filesystem's superblock;
+a negative return value indicates failure. A "put_page" will copy a
+(presumably about-to-be-evicted) page into cleancache and associate it with
+the pool id, a file key, and a page index into the file. (The combination
+of a pool id, a file key, and an index is sometimes called a "handle".)
+A "get_page" will copy the page, if found, from cleancache into kernel memory.
+An "invalidate_page" will ensure the page no longer is present in cleancache;
+an "invalidate_inode" will invalidate all pages associated with the specified
+file; and, when a filesystem is unmounted, an "invalidate_fs" will invalidate
+all pages in all files specified by the given pool id and also surrender
+the pool id.
+
+An "init_shared_fs", like init_fs, obtains a pool id but tells cleancache
+to treat the pool as shared using a 128-bit UUID as a key. On systems
+that may run multiple kernels (such as hard partitioned or virtualized
+systems) that may share a clustered filesystem, and where cleancache
+may be shared among those kernels, calls to init_shared_fs that specify the
+same UUID will receive the same pool id, thus allowing the pages to
+be shared. Note that any security requirements must be imposed outside
+of the kernel (e.g. by "tools" that control cleancache). Or a
+cleancache implementation can simply disable shared_init by always
+returning a negative value.
+
+If a get_page is successful on a non-shared pool, the page is invalidated
+(thus making cleancache an "exclusive" cache). On a shared pool, the page
+is NOT invalidated on a successful get_page so that it remains accessible to
+other sharers. The kernel is responsible for ensuring coherency between
+cleancache (shared or not), the page cache, and the filesystem, using
+cleancache invalidate operations as required.
+
+Note that cleancache must enforce put-put-get coherency and get-get
+coherency. For the former, if two puts are made to the same handle but
+with different data, say AAA by the first put and BBB by the second, a
+subsequent get can never return the stale data (AAA). For get-get coherency,
+if a get for a given handle fails, subsequent gets for that handle will
+never succeed unless preceded by a successful put with that handle.
+
+Last, cleancache provides no SMP serialization guarantees; if two
+different Linux threads are simultaneously putting and invalidating a page
+with the same handle, the results are indeterminate. Callers must
+lock the page to ensure serial behavior.
+
+CLEANCACHE PERFORMANCE METRICS
+
+If properly configured, monitoring of cleancache is done via debugfs in
+the /sys/kernel/debug/cleancache directory. The effectiveness of cleancache
+can be measured (across all filesystems) with:
+
+succ_gets - number of gets that were successful
+failed_gets - number of gets that failed
+puts - number of puts attempted (all "succeed")
+invalidates - number of invalidates attempted
+
+A backend implementation may provide additional metrics.
+
+FAQ
+
+1) Where's the value? (Andrew Morton)
+
+Cleancache provides a significant performance benefit to many workloads
+in many environments with negligible overhead by improving the
+effectiveness of the pagecache. Clean pagecache pages are
+saved in transcendent memory (RAM that is otherwise not directly
+addressable to the kernel); fetching those pages later avoids "refaults"
+and thus disk reads.
+
+Cleancache (and its sister code "frontswap") provide interfaces for
+this transcendent memory (aka "tmem"), which conceptually lies between
+fast kernel-directly-addressable RAM and slower DMA/asynchronous devices.
+Disallowing direct kernel or userland reads/writes to tmem
+is ideal when data is transformed to a different form and size (such
+as with compression) or secretly moved (as might be useful for write-
+balancing for some RAM-like devices). Evicted page-cache pages (and
+swap pages) are a great use for this kind of slower-than-RAM-but-much-
+faster-than-disk transcendent memory, and the cleancache (and frontswap)
+"page-object-oriented" specification provides a nice way to read and
+write -- and indirectly "name" -- the pages.
+
+In the virtual case, the whole point of virtualization is to statistically
+multiplex physical resources across the varying demands of multiple
+virtual machines. This is really hard to do with RAM and efforts to
+do it well with no kernel change have essentially failed (except in some
+well-publicized special-case workloads). Cleancache -- and frontswap --
+with a fairly small impact on the kernel, provide a huge amount
+of flexibility for more dynamic, flexible RAM multiplexing.
+Specifically, the Xen Transcendent Memory backend allows otherwise
+"fallow" hypervisor-owned RAM to not only be "time-shared" between multiple
+virtual machines, but the pages can be compressed and deduplicated to
+optimize RAM utilization. And when guest OS's are induced to surrender
+underutilized RAM (e.g. with "self-ballooning"), page cache pages
+are the first to go, and cleancache allows those pages to be
+saved and reclaimed if overall host system memory conditions allow.
+
+And the identical interface used for cleancache can be used in
+physical systems as well. The zcache driver acts as a memory-hungry
+device that stores pages of data in a compressed state. And
+the proposed "RAMster" driver shares RAM across multiple physical
+systems.
+
+2) Why does cleancache have its sticky fingers so deep inside the
+ filesystems and VFS? (Andrew Morton and Christoph Hellwig)
+
+The core hooks for cleancache in VFS are in most cases a single line
+and the minimum set are placed precisely where needed to maintain
+coherency (via cleancache_invalidate operations) between cleancache,
+the page cache, and disk. All hooks compile into nothingness if
+cleancache is config'ed off and turn into a function-pointer-
+compare-to-NULL if config'ed on but no backend claims the ops
+functions, or to a compare-struct-element-to-negative if a
+backend claims the ops functions but a filesystem doesn't enable
+cleancache.
+
+Some filesystems are built entirely on top of VFS and the hooks
+in VFS are sufficient, so don't require an "init_fs" hook; the
+initial implementation of cleancache didn't provide this hook.
+But for some filesystems (such as btrfs), the VFS hooks are
+incomplete and one or more hooks in fs-specific code are required.
+And for some other filesystems, such as tmpfs, cleancache may
+be counterproductive. So it seemed prudent to require a filesystem
+to "opt in" to use cleancache, which requires adding a hook in
+each filesystem. Not all filesystems are supported by cleancache
+only because they haven't been tested. The existing set should
+be sufficient to validate the concept, the opt-in approach means
+that untested filesystems are not affected, and the hooks in the
+existing filesystems should make it very easy to add more
+filesystems in the future.
+
+The total impact of the hooks to existing fs and mm files is only
+about 40 lines added (not counting comments and blank lines).
+
+3) Why not make cleancache asynchronous and batched so it can
+ more easily interface with real devices with DMA instead
+ of copying each individual page? (Minchan Kim)
+
+The one-page-at-a-time copy semantics simplifies the implementation
+on both the frontend and backend and also allows the backend to
+do fancy things on-the-fly like page compression and
+page deduplication. And since the data is "gone" (copied into/out
+of the pageframe) before the cleancache get/put call returns,
+a great deal of race conditions and potential coherency issues
+are avoided. While the interface seems odd for a "real device"
+or for real kernel-addressable RAM, it makes perfect sense for
+transcendent memory.
+
+4) Why is non-shared cleancache "exclusive"? And where is the
+ page "invalidated" after a "get"? (Minchan Kim)
+
+The main reason is to free up space in transcendent memory and
+to avoid unnecessary cleancache_invalidate calls. If you want inclusive,
+the page can be "put" immediately following the "get". If
+put-after-get for inclusive becomes common, the interface could
+be easily extended to add a "get_no_invalidate" call.
+
+The invalidate is done by the cleancache backend implementation.
+
+5) What's the performance impact?
+
+Performance analysis has been presented at OLS'09 and LCA'10.
+Briefly, performance gains can be significant on most workloads,
+especially when memory pressure is high (e.g. when RAM is
+overcommitted in a virtual workload); and because the hooks are
+invoked primarily in place of or in addition to a disk read/write,
+overhead is negligible even in worst case workloads. Basically
+cleancache replaces I/O with memory-copy-CPU-overhead; on older
+single-core systems with slow memory-copy speeds, cleancache
+has little value, but in newer multicore machines, especially
+consolidated/virtualized machines, it has great value.
+
+6) How do I add cleancache support for filesystem X? (Boaz Harrash)
+
+Filesystems that are well-behaved and conform to certain
+restrictions can utilize cleancache simply by making a call to
+cleancache_init_fs at mount time. Unusual, misbehaving, or
+poorly layered filesystems must either add additional hooks
+and/or undergo extensive additional testing... or should just
+not enable the optional cleancache.
+
+Some points for a filesystem to consider:
+
+- The FS should be block-device-based (e.g. a ram-based FS such
+ as tmpfs should not enable cleancache)
+- To ensure coherency/correctness, the FS must ensure that all
+ file removal or truncation operations either go through VFS or
+ add hooks to do the equivalent cleancache "invalidate" operations
+- To ensure coherency/correctness, either inode numbers must
+ be unique across the lifetime of the on-disk file OR the
+ FS must provide an "encode_fh" function.
+- The FS must call the VFS superblock alloc and deactivate routines
+ or add hooks to do the equivalent cleancache calls done there.
+- To maximize performance, all pages fetched from the FS should
+ go through the do_mpag_readpage routine or the FS should add
+ hooks to do the equivalent (cf. btrfs)
+- Currently, the FS blocksize must be the same as PAGESIZE. This
+ is not an architectural restriction, but no backends currently
+ support anything different.
+- A clustered FS should invoke the "shared_init_fs" cleancache
+ hook to get best performance for some backends.
+
+7) Why not use the KVA of the inode as the key? (Christoph Hellwig)
+
+If cleancache would use the inode virtual address instead of
+inode/filehandle, the pool id could be eliminated. But, this
+won't work because cleancache retains pagecache data pages
+persistently even when the inode has been pruned from the
+inode unused list, and only invalidates the data page if the file
+gets removed/truncated. So if cleancache used the inode kva,
+there would be potential coherency issues if/when the inode
+kva is reused for a different file. Alternately, if cleancache
+invalidated the pages when the inode kva was freed, much of the value
+of cleancache would be lost because the cache of pages in cleanache
+is potentially much larger than the kernel pagecache and is most
+useful if the pages survive inode cache removal.
+
+8) Why is a global variable required?
+
+The cleancache_enabled flag is checked in all of the frequently-used
+cleancache hooks. The alternative is a function call to check a static
+variable. Since cleancache is enabled dynamically at runtime, systems
+that don't enable cleancache would suffer thousands (possibly
+tens-of-thousands) of unnecessary function calls per second. So the
+global variable allows cleancache to be enabled by default at compile
+time, but have insignificant performance impact when cleancache remains
+disabled at runtime.
+
+9) Does cleanache work with KVM?
+
+The memory model of KVM is sufficiently different that a cleancache
+backend may have less value for KVM. This remains to be tested,
+especially in an overcommitted system.
+
+10) Does cleancache work in userspace? It sounds useful for
+ memory hungry caches like web browsers. (Jamie Lokier)
+
+No plans yet, though we agree it sounds useful, at least for
+apps that bypass the page cache (e.g. O_DIRECT).
+
+Last updated: Dan Magenheimer, April 13 2011
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/frontswap.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/frontswap.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..c71a019be
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/frontswap.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,278 @@
+Frontswap provides a "transcendent memory" interface for swap pages.
+In some environments, dramatic performance savings may be obtained because
+swapped pages are saved in RAM (or a RAM-like device) instead of a swap disk.
+
+(Note, frontswap -- and cleancache (merged at 3.0) -- are the "frontends"
+and the only necessary changes to the core kernel for transcendent memory;
+all other supporting code -- the "backends" -- is implemented as drivers.
+See the LWN.net article "Transcendent memory in a nutshell" for a detailed
+overview of frontswap and related kernel parts:
+https://lwn.net/Articles/454795/ )
+
+Frontswap is so named because it can be thought of as the opposite of
+a "backing" store for a swap device. The storage is assumed to be
+a synchronous concurrency-safe page-oriented "pseudo-RAM device" conforming
+to the requirements of transcendent memory (such as Xen's "tmem", or
+in-kernel compressed memory, aka "zcache", or future RAM-like devices);
+this pseudo-RAM device is not directly accessible or addressable by the
+kernel and is of unknown and possibly time-varying size. The driver
+links itself to frontswap by calling frontswap_register_ops to set the
+frontswap_ops funcs appropriately and the functions it provides must
+conform to certain policies as follows:
+
+An "init" prepares the device to receive frontswap pages associated
+with the specified swap device number (aka "type"). A "store" will
+copy the page to transcendent memory and associate it with the type and
+offset associated with the page. A "load" will copy the page, if found,
+from transcendent memory into kernel memory, but will NOT remove the page
+from transcendent memory. An "invalidate_page" will remove the page
+from transcendent memory and an "invalidate_area" will remove ALL pages
+associated with the swap type (e.g., like swapoff) and notify the "device"
+to refuse further stores with that swap type.
+
+Once a page is successfully stored, a matching load on the page will normally
+succeed. So when the kernel finds itself in a situation where it needs
+to swap out a page, it first attempts to use frontswap. If the store returns
+success, the data has been successfully saved to transcendent memory and
+a disk write and, if the data is later read back, a disk read are avoided.
+If a store returns failure, transcendent memory has rejected the data, and the
+page can be written to swap as usual.
+
+If a backend chooses, frontswap can be configured as a "writethrough
+cache" by calling frontswap_writethrough(). In this mode, the reduction
+in swap device writes is lost (and also a non-trivial performance advantage)
+in order to allow the backend to arbitrarily "reclaim" space used to
+store frontswap pages to more completely manage its memory usage.
+
+Note that if a page is stored and the page already exists in transcendent memory
+(a "duplicate" store), either the store succeeds and the data is overwritten,
+or the store fails AND the page is invalidated. This ensures stale data may
+never be obtained from frontswap.
+
+If properly configured, monitoring of frontswap is done via debugfs in
+the /sys/kernel/debug/frontswap directory. The effectiveness of
+frontswap can be measured (across all swap devices) with:
+
+failed_stores - how many store attempts have failed
+loads - how many loads were attempted (all should succeed)
+succ_stores - how many store attempts have succeeded
+invalidates - how many invalidates were attempted
+
+A backend implementation may provide additional metrics.
+
+FAQ
+
+1) Where's the value?
+
+When a workload starts swapping, performance falls through the floor.
+Frontswap significantly increases performance in many such workloads by
+providing a clean, dynamic interface to read and write swap pages to
+"transcendent memory" that is otherwise not directly addressable to the kernel.
+This interface is ideal when data is transformed to a different form
+and size (such as with compression) or secretly moved (as might be
+useful for write-balancing for some RAM-like devices). Swap pages (and
+evicted page-cache pages) are a great use for this kind of slower-than-RAM-
+but-much-faster-than-disk "pseudo-RAM device" and the frontswap (and
+cleancache) interface to transcendent memory provides a nice way to read
+and write -- and indirectly "name" -- the pages.
+
+Frontswap -- and cleancache -- with a fairly small impact on the kernel,
+provides a huge amount of flexibility for more dynamic, flexible RAM
+utilization in various system configurations:
+
+In the single kernel case, aka "zcache", pages are compressed and
+stored in local memory, thus increasing the total anonymous pages
+that can be safely kept in RAM. Zcache essentially trades off CPU
+cycles used in compression/decompression for better memory utilization.
+Benchmarks have shown little or no impact when memory pressure is
+low while providing a significant performance improvement (25%+)
+on some workloads under high memory pressure.
+
+"RAMster" builds on zcache by adding "peer-to-peer" transcendent memory
+support for clustered systems. Frontswap pages are locally compressed
+as in zcache, but then "remotified" to another system's RAM. This
+allows RAM to be dynamically load-balanced back-and-forth as needed,
+i.e. when system A is overcommitted, it can swap to system B, and
+vice versa. RAMster can also be configured as a memory server so
+many servers in a cluster can swap, dynamically as needed, to a single
+server configured with a large amount of RAM... without pre-configuring
+how much of the RAM is available for each of the clients!
+
+In the virtual case, the whole point of virtualization is to statistically
+multiplex physical resources across the varying demands of multiple
+virtual machines. This is really hard to do with RAM and efforts to do
+it well with no kernel changes have essentially failed (except in some
+well-publicized special-case workloads).
+Specifically, the Xen Transcendent Memory backend allows otherwise
+"fallow" hypervisor-owned RAM to not only be "time-shared" between multiple
+virtual machines, but the pages can be compressed and deduplicated to
+optimize RAM utilization. And when guest OS's are induced to surrender
+underutilized RAM (e.g. with "selfballooning"), sudden unexpected
+memory pressure may result in swapping; frontswap allows those pages
+to be swapped to and from hypervisor RAM (if overall host system memory
+conditions allow), thus mitigating the potentially awful performance impact
+of unplanned swapping.
+
+A KVM implementation is underway and has been RFC'ed to lkml. And,
+using frontswap, investigation is also underway on the use of NVM as
+a memory extension technology.
+
+2) Sure there may be performance advantages in some situations, but
+ what's the space/time overhead of frontswap?
+
+If CONFIG_FRONTSWAP is disabled, every frontswap hook compiles into
+nothingness and the only overhead is a few extra bytes per swapon'ed
+swap device. If CONFIG_FRONTSWAP is enabled but no frontswap "backend"
+registers, there is one extra global variable compared to zero for
+every swap page read or written. If CONFIG_FRONTSWAP is enabled
+AND a frontswap backend registers AND the backend fails every "store"
+request (i.e. provides no memory despite claiming it might),
+CPU overhead is still negligible -- and since every frontswap fail
+precedes a swap page write-to-disk, the system is highly likely
+to be I/O bound and using a small fraction of a percent of a CPU
+will be irrelevant anyway.
+
+As for space, if CONFIG_FRONTSWAP is enabled AND a frontswap backend
+registers, one bit is allocated for every swap page for every swap
+device that is swapon'd. This is added to the EIGHT bits (which
+was sixteen until about 2.6.34) that the kernel already allocates
+for every swap page for every swap device that is swapon'd. (Hugh
+Dickins has observed that frontswap could probably steal one of
+the existing eight bits, but let's worry about that minor optimization
+later.) For very large swap disks (which are rare) on a standard
+4K pagesize, this is 1MB per 32GB swap.
+
+When swap pages are stored in transcendent memory instead of written
+out to disk, there is a side effect that this may create more memory
+pressure that can potentially outweigh the other advantages. A
+backend, such as zcache, must implement policies to carefully (but
+dynamically) manage memory limits to ensure this doesn't happen.
+
+3) OK, how about a quick overview of what this frontswap patch does
+ in terms that a kernel hacker can grok?
+
+Let's assume that a frontswap "backend" has registered during
+kernel initialization; this registration indicates that this
+frontswap backend has access to some "memory" that is not directly
+accessible by the kernel. Exactly how much memory it provides is
+entirely dynamic and random.
+
+Whenever a swap-device is swapon'd frontswap_init() is called,
+passing the swap device number (aka "type") as a parameter.
+This notifies frontswap to expect attempts to "store" swap pages
+associated with that number.
+
+Whenever the swap subsystem is readying a page to write to a swap
+device (c.f swap_writepage()), frontswap_store is called. Frontswap
+consults with the frontswap backend and if the backend says it does NOT
+have room, frontswap_store returns -1 and the kernel swaps the page
+to the swap device as normal. Note that the response from the frontswap
+backend is unpredictable to the kernel; it may choose to never accept a
+page, it could accept every ninth page, or it might accept every
+page. But if the backend does accept a page, the data from the page
+has already been copied and associated with the type and offset,
+and the backend guarantees the persistence of the data. In this case,
+frontswap sets a bit in the "frontswap_map" for the swap device
+corresponding to the page offset on the swap device to which it would
+otherwise have written the data.
+
+When the swap subsystem needs to swap-in a page (swap_readpage()),
+it first calls frontswap_load() which checks the frontswap_map to
+see if the page was earlier accepted by the frontswap backend. If
+it was, the page of data is filled from the frontswap backend and
+the swap-in is complete. If not, the normal swap-in code is
+executed to obtain the page of data from the real swap device.
+
+So every time the frontswap backend accepts a page, a swap device read
+and (potentially) a swap device write are replaced by a "frontswap backend
+store" and (possibly) a "frontswap backend loads", which are presumably much
+faster.
+
+4) Can't frontswap be configured as a "special" swap device that is
+ just higher priority than any real swap device (e.g. like zswap,
+ or maybe swap-over-nbd/NFS)?
+
+No. First, the existing swap subsystem doesn't allow for any kind of
+swap hierarchy. Perhaps it could be rewritten to accommodate a hierarchy,
+but this would require fairly drastic changes. Even if it were
+rewritten, the existing swap subsystem uses the block I/O layer which
+assumes a swap device is fixed size and any page in it is linearly
+addressable. Frontswap barely touches the existing swap subsystem,
+and works around the constraints of the block I/O subsystem to provide
+a great deal of flexibility and dynamicity.
+
+For example, the acceptance of any swap page by the frontswap backend is
+entirely unpredictable. This is critical to the definition of frontswap
+backends because it grants completely dynamic discretion to the
+backend. In zcache, one cannot know a priori how compressible a page is.
+"Poorly" compressible pages can be rejected, and "poorly" can itself be
+defined dynamically depending on current memory constraints.
+
+Further, frontswap is entirely synchronous whereas a real swap
+device is, by definition, asynchronous and uses block I/O. The
+block I/O layer is not only unnecessary, but may perform "optimizations"
+that are inappropriate for a RAM-oriented device including delaying
+the write of some pages for a significant amount of time. Synchrony is
+required to ensure the dynamicity of the backend and to avoid thorny race
+conditions that would unnecessarily and greatly complicate frontswap
+and/or the block I/O subsystem. That said, only the initial "store"
+and "load" operations need be synchronous. A separate asynchronous thread
+is free to manipulate the pages stored by frontswap. For example,
+the "remotification" thread in RAMster uses standard asynchronous
+kernel sockets to move compressed frontswap pages to a remote machine.
+Similarly, a KVM guest-side implementation could do in-guest compression
+and use "batched" hypercalls.
+
+In a virtualized environment, the dynamicity allows the hypervisor
+(or host OS) to do "intelligent overcommit". For example, it can
+choose to accept pages only until host-swapping might be imminent,
+then force guests to do their own swapping.
+
+There is a downside to the transcendent memory specifications for
+frontswap: Since any "store" might fail, there must always be a real
+slot on a real swap device to swap the page. Thus frontswap must be
+implemented as a "shadow" to every swapon'd device with the potential
+capability of holding every page that the swap device might have held
+and the possibility that it might hold no pages at all. This means
+that frontswap cannot contain more pages than the total of swapon'd
+swap devices. For example, if NO swap device is configured on some
+installation, frontswap is useless. Swapless portable devices
+can still use frontswap but a backend for such devices must configure
+some kind of "ghost" swap device and ensure that it is never used.
+
+5) Why this weird definition about "duplicate stores"? If a page
+ has been previously successfully stored, can't it always be
+ successfully overwritten?
+
+Nearly always it can, but no, sometimes it cannot. Consider an example
+where data is compressed and the original 4K page has been compressed
+to 1K. Now an attempt is made to overwrite the page with data that
+is non-compressible and so would take the entire 4K. But the backend
+has no more space. In this case, the store must be rejected. Whenever
+frontswap rejects a store that would overwrite, it also must invalidate
+the old data and ensure that it is no longer accessible. Since the
+swap subsystem then writes the new data to the read swap device,
+this is the correct course of action to ensure coherency.
+
+6) What is frontswap_shrink for?
+
+When the (non-frontswap) swap subsystem swaps out a page to a real
+swap device, that page is only taking up low-value pre-allocated disk
+space. But if frontswap has placed a page in transcendent memory, that
+page may be taking up valuable real estate. The frontswap_shrink
+routine allows code outside of the swap subsystem to force pages out
+of the memory managed by frontswap and back into kernel-addressable memory.
+For example, in RAMster, a "suction driver" thread will attempt
+to "repatriate" pages sent to a remote machine back to the local machine;
+this is driven using the frontswap_shrink mechanism when memory pressure
+subsides.
+
+7) Why does the frontswap patch create the new include file swapfile.h?
+
+The frontswap code depends on some swap-subsystem-internal data
+structures that have, over the years, moved back and forth between
+static and global. This seemed a reasonable compromise: Define
+them as global but declare them in a new include file that isn't
+included by the large number of source files that include swap.h.
+
+Dan Magenheimer, last updated April 9, 2012
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/highmem.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/highmem.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..4324d24ff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/highmem.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,162 @@
+
+ ====================
+ HIGH MEMORY HANDLING
+ ====================
+
+By: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
+
+Contents:
+
+ (*) What is high memory?
+
+ (*) Temporary virtual mappings.
+
+ (*) Using kmap_atomic.
+
+ (*) Cost of temporary mappings.
+
+ (*) i386 PAE.
+
+
+====================
+WHAT IS HIGH MEMORY?
+====================
+
+High memory (highmem) is used when the size of physical memory approaches or
+exceeds the maximum size of virtual memory. At that point it becomes
+impossible for the kernel to keep all of the available physical memory mapped
+at all times. This means the kernel needs to start using temporary mappings of
+the pieces of physical memory that it wants to access.
+
+The part of (physical) memory not covered by a permanent mapping is what we
+refer to as 'highmem'. There are various architecture dependent constraints on
+where exactly that border lies.
+
+In the i386 arch, for example, we choose to map the kernel into every process's
+VM space so that we don't have to pay the full TLB invalidation costs for
+kernel entry/exit. This means the available virtual memory space (4GiB on
+i386) has to be divided between user and kernel space.
+
+The traditional split for architectures using this approach is 3:1, 3GiB for
+userspace and the top 1GiB for kernel space:
+
+ +--------+ 0xffffffff
+ | Kernel |
+ +--------+ 0xc0000000
+ | |
+ | User |
+ | |
+ +--------+ 0x00000000
+
+This means that the kernel can at most map 1GiB of physical memory at any one
+time, but because we need virtual address space for other things - including
+temporary maps to access the rest of the physical memory - the actual direct
+map will typically be less (usually around ~896MiB).
+
+Other architectures that have mm context tagged TLBs can have separate kernel
+and user maps. Some hardware (like some ARMs), however, have limited virtual
+space when they use mm context tags.
+
+
+==========================
+TEMPORARY VIRTUAL MAPPINGS
+==========================
+
+The kernel contains several ways of creating temporary mappings:
+
+ (*) vmap(). This can be used to make a long duration mapping of multiple
+ physical pages into a contiguous virtual space. It needs global
+ synchronization to unmap.
+
+ (*) kmap(). This permits a short duration mapping of a single page. It needs
+ global synchronization, but is amortized somewhat. It is also prone to
+ deadlocks when using in a nested fashion, and so it is not recommended for
+ new code.
+
+ (*) kmap_atomic(). This permits a very short duration mapping of a single
+ page. Since the mapping is restricted to the CPU that issued it, it
+ performs well, but the issuing task is therefore required to stay on that
+ CPU until it has finished, lest some other task displace its mappings.
+
+ kmap_atomic() may also be used by interrupt contexts, since it is does not
+ sleep and the caller may not sleep until after kunmap_atomic() is called.
+
+ It may be assumed that k[un]map_atomic() won't fail.
+
+
+=================
+USING KMAP_ATOMIC
+=================
+
+When and where to use kmap_atomic() is straightforward. It is used when code
+wants to access the contents of a page that might be allocated from high memory
+(see __GFP_HIGHMEM), for example a page in the pagecache. The API has two
+functions, and they can be used in a manner similar to the following:
+
+ /* Find the page of interest. */
+ struct page *page = find_get_page(mapping, offset);
+
+ /* Gain access to the contents of that page. */
+ void *vaddr = kmap_atomic(page);
+
+ /* Do something to the contents of that page. */
+ memset(vaddr, 0, PAGE_SIZE);
+
+ /* Unmap that page. */
+ kunmap_atomic(vaddr);
+
+Note that the kunmap_atomic() call takes the result of the kmap_atomic() call
+not the argument.
+
+If you need to map two pages because you want to copy from one page to
+another you need to keep the kmap_atomic calls strictly nested, like:
+
+ vaddr1 = kmap_atomic(page1);
+ vaddr2 = kmap_atomic(page2);
+
+ memcpy(vaddr1, vaddr2, PAGE_SIZE);
+
+ kunmap_atomic(vaddr2);
+ kunmap_atomic(vaddr1);
+
+
+==========================
+COST OF TEMPORARY MAPPINGS
+==========================
+
+The cost of creating temporary mappings can be quite high. The arch has to
+manipulate the kernel's page tables, the data TLB and/or the MMU's registers.
+
+If CONFIG_HIGHMEM is not set, then the kernel will try and create a mapping
+simply with a bit of arithmetic that will convert the page struct address into
+a pointer to the page contents rather than juggling mappings about. In such a
+case, the unmap operation may be a null operation.
+
+If CONFIG_MMU is not set, then there can be no temporary mappings and no
+highmem. In such a case, the arithmetic approach will also be used.
+
+
+========
+i386 PAE
+========
+
+The i386 arch, under some circumstances, will permit you to stick up to 64GiB
+of RAM into your 32-bit machine. This has a number of consequences:
+
+ (*) Linux needs a page-frame structure for each page in the system and the
+ pageframes need to live in the permanent mapping, which means:
+
+ (*) you can have 896M/sizeof(struct page) page-frames at most; with struct
+ page being 32-bytes that would end up being something in the order of 112G
+ worth of pages; the kernel, however, needs to store more than just
+ page-frames in that memory...
+
+ (*) PAE makes your page tables larger - which slows the system down as more
+ data has to be accessed to traverse in TLB fills and the like. One
+ advantage is that PAE has more PTE bits and can provide advanced features
+ like NX and PAT.
+
+The general recommendation is that you don't use more than 8GiB on a 32-bit
+machine - although more might work for you and your workload, you're pretty
+much on your own - don't expect kernel developers to really care much if things
+come apart.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..030977fb8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,335 @@
+
+The intent of this file is to give a brief summary of hugetlbpage support in
+the Linux kernel. This support is built on top of multiple page size support
+that is provided by most modern architectures. For example, x86 CPUs normally
+support 4K and 2M (1G if architecturally supported) page sizes, ia64
+architecture supports multiple page sizes 4K, 8K, 64K, 256K, 1M, 4M, 16M,
+256M and ppc64 supports 4K and 16M. A TLB is a cache of virtual-to-physical
+translations. Typically this is a very scarce resource on processor.
+Operating systems try to make best use of limited number of TLB resources.
+This optimization is more critical now as bigger and bigger physical memories
+(several GBs) are more readily available.
+
+Users can use the huge page support in Linux kernel by either using the mmap
+system call or standard SYSV shared memory system calls (shmget, shmat).
+
+First the Linux kernel needs to be built with the CONFIG_HUGETLBFS
+(present under "File systems") and CONFIG_HUGETLB_PAGE (selected
+automatically when CONFIG_HUGETLBFS is selected) configuration
+options.
+
+The /proc/meminfo file provides information about the total number of
+persistent hugetlb pages in the kernel's huge page pool. It also displays
+information about the number of free, reserved and surplus huge pages and the
+default huge page size. The huge page size is needed for generating the
+proper alignment and size of the arguments to system calls that map huge page
+regions.
+
+The output of "cat /proc/meminfo" will include lines like:
+
+.....
+HugePages_Total: vvv
+HugePages_Free: www
+HugePages_Rsvd: xxx
+HugePages_Surp: yyy
+Hugepagesize: zzz kB
+
+where:
+HugePages_Total is the size of the pool of huge pages.
+HugePages_Free is the number of huge pages in the pool that are not yet
+ allocated.
+HugePages_Rsvd is short for "reserved," and is the number of huge pages for
+ which a commitment to allocate from the pool has been made,
+ but no allocation has yet been made. Reserved huge pages
+ guarantee that an application will be able to allocate a
+ huge page from the pool of huge pages at fault time.
+HugePages_Surp is short for "surplus," and is the number of huge pages in
+ the pool above the value in /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages. The
+ maximum number of surplus huge pages is controlled by
+ /proc/sys/vm/nr_overcommit_hugepages.
+
+/proc/filesystems should also show a filesystem of type "hugetlbfs" configured
+in the kernel.
+
+/proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages indicates the current number of "persistent" huge
+pages in the kernel's huge page pool. "Persistent" huge pages will be
+returned to the huge page pool when freed by a task. A user with root
+privileges can dynamically allocate more or free some persistent huge pages
+by increasing or decreasing the value of 'nr_hugepages'.
+
+Pages that are used as huge pages are reserved inside the kernel and cannot
+be used for other purposes. Huge pages cannot be swapped out under
+memory pressure.
+
+Once a number of huge pages have been pre-allocated to the kernel huge page
+pool, a user with appropriate privilege can use either the mmap system call
+or shared memory system calls to use the huge pages. See the discussion of
+Using Huge Pages, below.
+
+The administrator can allocate persistent huge pages on the kernel boot
+command line by specifying the "hugepages=N" parameter, where 'N' = the
+number of huge pages requested. This is the most reliable method of
+allocating huge pages as memory has not yet become fragmented.
+
+Some platforms support multiple huge page sizes. To allocate huge pages
+of a specific size, one must precede the huge pages boot command parameters
+with a huge page size selection parameter "hugepagesz=<size>". <size> must
+be specified in bytes with optional scale suffix [kKmMgG]. The default huge
+page size may be selected with the "default_hugepagesz=<size>" boot parameter.
+
+When multiple huge page sizes are supported, /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages
+indicates the current number of pre-allocated huge pages of the default size.
+Thus, one can use the following command to dynamically allocate/deallocate
+default sized persistent huge pages:
+
+ echo 20 > /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages
+
+This command will try to adjust the number of default sized huge pages in the
+huge page pool to 20, allocating or freeing huge pages, as required.
+
+On a NUMA platform, the kernel will attempt to distribute the huge page pool
+over all the set of allowed nodes specified by the NUMA memory policy of the
+task that modifies nr_hugepages. The default for the allowed nodes--when the
+task has default memory policy--is all on-line nodes with memory. Allowed
+nodes with insufficient available, contiguous memory for a huge page will be
+silently skipped when allocating persistent huge pages. See the discussion
+below of the interaction of task memory policy, cpusets and per node attributes
+with the allocation and freeing of persistent huge pages.
+
+The success or failure of huge page allocation depends on the amount of
+physically contiguous memory that is present in system at the time of the
+allocation attempt. If the kernel is unable to allocate huge pages from
+some nodes in a NUMA system, it will attempt to make up the difference by
+allocating extra pages on other nodes with sufficient available contiguous
+memory, if any.
+
+System administrators may want to put this command in one of the local rc
+init files. This will enable the kernel to allocate huge pages early in
+the boot process when the possibility of getting physical contiguous pages
+is still very high. Administrators can verify the number of huge pages
+actually allocated by checking the sysctl or meminfo. To check the per node
+distribution of huge pages in a NUMA system, use:
+
+ cat /sys/devices/system/node/node*/meminfo | fgrep Huge
+
+/proc/sys/vm/nr_overcommit_hugepages specifies how large the pool of
+huge pages can grow, if more huge pages than /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages are
+requested by applications. Writing any non-zero value into this file
+indicates that the hugetlb subsystem is allowed to try to obtain that
+number of "surplus" huge pages from the kernel's normal page pool, when the
+persistent huge page pool is exhausted. As these surplus huge pages become
+unused, they are freed back to the kernel's normal page pool.
+
+When increasing the huge page pool size via nr_hugepages, any existing surplus
+pages will first be promoted to persistent huge pages. Then, additional
+huge pages will be allocated, if necessary and if possible, to fulfill
+the new persistent huge page pool size.
+
+The administrator may shrink the pool of persistent huge pages for
+the default huge page size by setting the nr_hugepages sysctl to a
+smaller value. The kernel will attempt to balance the freeing of huge pages
+across all nodes in the memory policy of the task modifying nr_hugepages.
+Any free huge pages on the selected nodes will be freed back to the kernel's
+normal page pool.
+
+Caveat: Shrinking the persistent huge page pool via nr_hugepages such that
+it becomes less than the number of huge pages in use will convert the balance
+of the in-use huge pages to surplus huge pages. This will occur even if
+the number of surplus pages it would exceed the overcommit value. As long as
+this condition holds--that is, until nr_hugepages+nr_overcommit_hugepages is
+increased sufficiently, or the surplus huge pages go out of use and are freed--
+no more surplus huge pages will be allowed to be allocated.
+
+With support for multiple huge page pools at run-time available, much of
+the huge page userspace interface in /proc/sys/vm has been duplicated in sysfs.
+The /proc interfaces discussed above have been retained for backwards
+compatibility. The root huge page control directory in sysfs is:
+
+ /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages
+
+For each huge page size supported by the running kernel, a subdirectory
+will exist, of the form:
+
+ hugepages-${size}kB
+
+Inside each of these directories, the same set of files will exist:
+
+ nr_hugepages
+ nr_hugepages_mempolicy
+ nr_overcommit_hugepages
+ free_hugepages
+ resv_hugepages
+ surplus_hugepages
+
+which function as described above for the default huge page-sized case.
+
+
+Interaction of Task Memory Policy with Huge Page Allocation/Freeing
+===================================================================
+
+Whether huge pages are allocated and freed via the /proc interface or
+the /sysfs interface using the nr_hugepages_mempolicy attribute, the NUMA
+nodes from which huge pages are allocated or freed are controlled by the
+NUMA memory policy of the task that modifies the nr_hugepages_mempolicy
+sysctl or attribute. When the nr_hugepages attribute is used, mempolicy
+is ignored.
+
+The recommended method to allocate or free huge pages to/from the kernel
+huge page pool, using the nr_hugepages example above, is:
+
+ numactl --interleave <node-list> echo 20 \
+ >/proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages_mempolicy
+
+or, more succinctly:
+
+ numactl -m <node-list> echo 20 >/proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages_mempolicy
+
+This will allocate or free abs(20 - nr_hugepages) to or from the nodes
+specified in <node-list>, depending on whether number of persistent huge pages
+is initially less than or greater than 20, respectively. No huge pages will be
+allocated nor freed on any node not included in the specified <node-list>.
+
+When adjusting the persistent hugepage count via nr_hugepages_mempolicy, any
+memory policy mode--bind, preferred, local or interleave--may be used. The
+resulting effect on persistent huge page allocation is as follows:
+
+1) Regardless of mempolicy mode [see Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt],
+ persistent huge pages will be distributed across the node or nodes
+ specified in the mempolicy as if "interleave" had been specified.
+ However, if a node in the policy does not contain sufficient contiguous
+ memory for a huge page, the allocation will not "fallback" to the nearest
+ neighbor node with sufficient contiguous memory. To do this would cause
+ undesirable imbalance in the distribution of the huge page pool, or
+ possibly, allocation of persistent huge pages on nodes not allowed by
+ the task's memory policy.
+
+2) One or more nodes may be specified with the bind or interleave policy.
+ If more than one node is specified with the preferred policy, only the
+ lowest numeric id will be used. Local policy will select the node where
+ the task is running at the time the nodes_allowed mask is constructed.
+ For local policy to be deterministic, the task must be bound to a cpu or
+ cpus in a single node. Otherwise, the task could be migrated to some
+ other node at any time after launch and the resulting node will be
+ indeterminate. Thus, local policy is not very useful for this purpose.
+ Any of the other mempolicy modes may be used to specify a single node.
+
+3) The nodes allowed mask will be derived from any non-default task mempolicy,
+ whether this policy was set explicitly by the task itself or one of its
+ ancestors, such as numactl. This means that if the task is invoked from a
+ shell with non-default policy, that policy will be used. One can specify a
+ node list of "all" with numactl --interleave or --membind [-m] to achieve
+ interleaving over all nodes in the system or cpuset.
+
+4) Any task mempolicy specifed--e.g., using numactl--will be constrained by
+ the resource limits of any cpuset in which the task runs. Thus, there will
+ be no way for a task with non-default policy running in a cpuset with a
+ subset of the system nodes to allocate huge pages outside the cpuset
+ without first moving to a cpuset that contains all of the desired nodes.
+
+5) Boot-time huge page allocation attempts to distribute the requested number
+ of huge pages over all on-lines nodes with memory.
+
+Per Node Hugepages Attributes
+=============================
+
+A subset of the contents of the root huge page control directory in sysfs,
+described above, will be replicated under each the system device of each
+NUMA node with memory in:
+
+ /sys/devices/system/node/node[0-9]*/hugepages/
+
+Under this directory, the subdirectory for each supported huge page size
+contains the following attribute files:
+
+ nr_hugepages
+ free_hugepages
+ surplus_hugepages
+
+The free_' and surplus_' attribute files are read-only. They return the number
+of free and surplus [overcommitted] huge pages, respectively, on the parent
+node.
+
+The nr_hugepages attribute returns the total number of huge pages on the
+specified node. When this attribute is written, the number of persistent huge
+pages on the parent node will be adjusted to the specified value, if sufficient
+resources exist, regardless of the task's mempolicy or cpuset constraints.
+
+Note that the number of overcommit and reserve pages remain global quantities,
+as we don't know until fault time, when the faulting task's mempolicy is
+applied, from which node the huge page allocation will be attempted.
+
+
+Using Huge Pages
+================
+
+If the user applications are going to request huge pages using mmap system
+call, then it is required that system administrator mount a file system of
+type hugetlbfs:
+
+ mount -t hugetlbfs \
+ -o uid=<value>,gid=<value>,mode=<value>,pagesize=<value>,size=<value>,\
+ min_size=<value>,nr_inodes=<value> none /mnt/huge
+
+This command mounts a (pseudo) filesystem of type hugetlbfs on the directory
+/mnt/huge. Any files created on /mnt/huge uses huge pages. The uid and gid
+options sets the owner and group of the root of the file system. By default
+the uid and gid of the current process are taken. The mode option sets the
+mode of root of file system to value & 01777. This value is given in octal.
+By default the value 0755 is picked. If the paltform supports multiple huge
+page sizes, the pagesize option can be used to specify the huge page size and
+associated pool. pagesize is specified in bytes. If pagesize is not specified
+the paltform's default huge page size and associated pool will be used. The
+size option sets the maximum value of memory (huge pages) allowed for that
+filesystem (/mnt/huge). The size option can be specified in bytes, or as a
+percentage of the specified huge page pool (nr_hugepages). The size is
+rounded down to HPAGE_SIZE boundary. The min_size option sets the minimum
+value of memory (huge pages) allowed for the filesystem. min_size can be
+specified in the same way as size, either bytes or a percentage of the
+huge page pool. At mount time, the number of huge pages specified by
+min_size are reserved for use by the filesystem. If there are not enough
+free huge pages available, the mount will fail. As huge pages are allocated
+to the filesystem and freed, the reserve count is adjusted so that the sum
+of allocated and reserved huge pages is always at least min_size. The option
+nr_inodes sets the maximum number of inodes that /mnt/huge can use. If the
+size, min_size or nr_inodes option is not provided on command line then
+no limits are set. For pagesize, size, min_size and nr_inodes options, you
+can use [G|g]/[M|m]/[K|k] to represent giga/mega/kilo. For example, size=2K
+has the same meaning as size=2048.
+
+While read system calls are supported on files that reside on hugetlb
+file systems, write system calls are not.
+
+Regular chown, chgrp, and chmod commands (with right permissions) could be
+used to change the file attributes on hugetlbfs.
+
+Also, it is important to note that no such mount command is required if
+applications are going to use only shmat/shmget system calls or mmap with
+MAP_HUGETLB. For an example of how to use mmap with MAP_HUGETLB see map_hugetlb
+below.
+
+Users who wish to use hugetlb memory via shared memory segment should be a
+member of a supplementary group and system admin needs to configure that gid
+into /proc/sys/vm/hugetlb_shm_group. It is possible for same or different
+applications to use any combination of mmaps and shm* calls, though the mount of
+filesystem will be required for using mmap calls without MAP_HUGETLB.
+
+Syscalls that operate on memory backed by hugetlb pages only have their lengths
+aligned to the native page size of the processor; they will normally fail with
+errno set to EINVAL or exclude hugetlb pages that extend beyond the length if
+not hugepage aligned. For example, munmap(2) will fail if memory is backed by
+a hugetlb page and the length is smaller than the hugepage size.
+
+
+Examples
+========
+
+1) map_hugetlb: see tools/testing/selftests/vm/map_hugetlb.c
+
+2) hugepage-shm: see tools/testing/selftests/vm/hugepage-shm.c
+
+3) hugepage-mmap: see tools/testing/selftests/vm/hugepage-mmap.c
+
+4) The libhugetlbfs (http://libhugetlbfs.sourceforge.net) library provides a
+ wide range of userspace tools to help with huge page usability, environment
+ setup, and control. Furthermore it provides useful test cases that should be
+ used when modifying code to ensure no regressions are introduced.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/hwpoison.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/hwpoison.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..6ae89a9ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/hwpoison.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,187 @@
+What is hwpoison?
+
+Upcoming Intel CPUs have support for recovering from some memory errors
+(``MCA recovery''). This requires the OS to declare a page "poisoned",
+kill the processes associated with it and avoid using it in the future.
+
+This patchkit implements the necessary infrastructure in the VM.
+
+To quote the overview comment:
+
+ * High level machine check handler. Handles pages reported by the
+ * hardware as being corrupted usually due to a 2bit ECC memory or cache
+ * failure.
+ *
+ * This focusses on pages detected as corrupted in the background.
+ * When the current CPU tries to consume corruption the currently
+ * running process can just be killed directly instead. This implies
+ * that if the error cannot be handled for some reason it's safe to
+ * just ignore it because no corruption has been consumed yet. Instead
+ * when that happens another machine check will happen.
+ *
+ * Handles page cache pages in various states. The tricky part
+ * here is that we can access any page asynchronous to other VM
+ * users, because memory failures could happen anytime and anywhere,
+ * possibly violating some of their assumptions. This is why this code
+ * has to be extremely careful. Generally it tries to use normal locking
+ * rules, as in get the standard locks, even if that means the
+ * error handling takes potentially a long time.
+ *
+ * Some of the operations here are somewhat inefficient and have non
+ * linear algorithmic complexity, because the data structures have not
+ * been optimized for this case. This is in particular the case
+ * for the mapping from a vma to a process. Since this case is expected
+ * to be rare we hope we can get away with this.
+
+The code consists of a the high level handler in mm/memory-failure.c,
+a new page poison bit and various checks in the VM to handle poisoned
+pages.
+
+The main target right now is KVM guests, but it works for all kinds
+of applications. KVM support requires a recent qemu-kvm release.
+
+For the KVM use there was need for a new signal type so that
+KVM can inject the machine check into the guest with the proper
+address. This in theory allows other applications to handle
+memory failures too. The expection is that near all applications
+won't do that, but some very specialized ones might.
+
+---
+
+There are two (actually three) modi memory failure recovery can be in:
+
+vm.memory_failure_recovery sysctl set to zero:
+ All memory failures cause a panic. Do not attempt recovery.
+ (on x86 this can be also affected by the tolerant level of the
+ MCE subsystem)
+
+early kill
+ (can be controlled globally and per process)
+ Send SIGBUS to the application as soon as the error is detected
+ This allows applications who can process memory errors in a gentle
+ way (e.g. drop affected object)
+ This is the mode used by KVM qemu.
+
+late kill
+ Send SIGBUS when the application runs into the corrupted page.
+ This is best for memory error unaware applications and default
+ Note some pages are always handled as late kill.
+
+---
+
+User control:
+
+vm.memory_failure_recovery
+ See sysctl.txt
+
+vm.memory_failure_early_kill
+ Enable early kill mode globally
+
+PR_MCE_KILL
+ Set early/late kill mode/revert to system default
+ arg1: PR_MCE_KILL_CLEAR: Revert to system default
+ arg1: PR_MCE_KILL_SET: arg2 defines thread specific mode
+ PR_MCE_KILL_EARLY: Early kill
+ PR_MCE_KILL_LATE: Late kill
+ PR_MCE_KILL_DEFAULT: Use system global default
+ Note that if you want to have a dedicated thread which handles
+ the SIGBUS(BUS_MCEERR_AO) on behalf of the process, you should
+ call prctl(PR_MCE_KILL_EARLY) on the designated thread. Otherwise,
+ the SIGBUS is sent to the main thread.
+
+PR_MCE_KILL_GET
+ return current mode
+
+
+---
+
+Testing:
+
+madvise(MADV_HWPOISON, ....)
+ (as root)
+ Poison a page in the process for testing
+
+
+hwpoison-inject module through debugfs
+
+/sys/debug/hwpoison/
+
+corrupt-pfn
+
+Inject hwpoison fault at PFN echoed into this file. This does
+some early filtering to avoid corrupted unintended pages in test suites.
+
+unpoison-pfn
+
+Software-unpoison page at PFN echoed into this file. This
+way a page can be reused again.
+This only works for Linux injected failures, not for real
+memory failures.
+
+Note these injection interfaces are not stable and might change between
+kernel versions
+
+corrupt-filter-dev-major
+corrupt-filter-dev-minor
+
+Only handle memory failures to pages associated with the file system defined
+by block device major/minor. -1U is the wildcard value.
+This should be only used for testing with artificial injection.
+
+corrupt-filter-memcg
+
+Limit injection to pages owned by memgroup. Specified by inode number
+of the memcg.
+
+Example:
+ mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/mem/hwpoison
+
+ usemem -m 100 -s 1000 &
+ echo `jobs -p` > /sys/fs/cgroup/mem/hwpoison/tasks
+
+ memcg_ino=$(ls -id /sys/fs/cgroup/mem/hwpoison | cut -f1 -d' ')
+ echo $memcg_ino > /debug/hwpoison/corrupt-filter-memcg
+
+ page-types -p `pidof init` --hwpoison # shall do nothing
+ page-types -p `pidof usemem` --hwpoison # poison its pages
+
+corrupt-filter-flags-mask
+corrupt-filter-flags-value
+
+When specified, only poison pages if ((page_flags & mask) == value).
+This allows stress testing of many kinds of pages. The page_flags
+are the same as in /proc/kpageflags. The flag bits are defined in
+include/linux/kernel-page-flags.h and documented in
+Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt
+
+Architecture specific MCE injector
+
+x86 has mce-inject, mce-test
+
+Some portable hwpoison test programs in mce-test, see blow.
+
+---
+
+References:
+
+http://halobates.de/mce-lc09-2.pdf
+ Overview presentation from LinuxCon 09
+
+git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/cpu/mce/mce-test.git
+ Test suite (hwpoison specific portable tests in tsrc)
+
+git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/cpu/mce/mce-inject.git
+ x86 specific injector
+
+
+---
+
+Limitations:
+
+- Not all page types are supported and never will. Most kernel internal
+objects cannot be recovered, only LRU pages for now.
+- Right now hugepage support is missing.
+
+---
+Andi Kleen, Oct 2009
+
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..f34a8ee6f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,97 @@
+How to use the Kernel Samepage Merging feature
+----------------------------------------------
+
+KSM is a memory-saving de-duplication feature, enabled by CONFIG_KSM=y,
+added to the Linux kernel in 2.6.32. See mm/ksm.c for its implementation,
+and http://lwn.net/Articles/306704/ and http://lwn.net/Articles/330589/
+
+The KSM daemon ksmd periodically scans those areas of user memory which
+have been registered with it, looking for pages of identical content which
+can be replaced by a single write-protected page (which is automatically
+copied if a process later wants to update its content).
+
+KSM was originally developed for use with KVM (where it was known as
+Kernel Shared Memory), to fit more virtual machines into physical memory,
+by sharing the data common between them. But it can be useful to any
+application which generates many instances of the same data.
+
+KSM only merges anonymous (private) pages, never pagecache (file) pages.
+KSM's merged pages were originally locked into kernel memory, but can now
+be swapped out just like other user pages (but sharing is broken when they
+are swapped back in: ksmd must rediscover their identity and merge again).
+
+KSM only operates on those areas of address space which an application
+has advised to be likely candidates for merging, by using the madvise(2)
+system call: int madvise(addr, length, MADV_MERGEABLE).
+
+The app may call int madvise(addr, length, MADV_UNMERGEABLE) to cancel
+that advice and restore unshared pages: whereupon KSM unmerges whatever
+it merged in that range. Note: this unmerging call may suddenly require
+more memory than is available - possibly failing with EAGAIN, but more
+probably arousing the Out-Of-Memory killer.
+
+If KSM is not configured into the running kernel, madvise MADV_MERGEABLE
+and MADV_UNMERGEABLE simply fail with EINVAL. If the running kernel was
+built with CONFIG_KSM=y, those calls will normally succeed: even if the
+the KSM daemon is not currently running, MADV_MERGEABLE still registers
+the range for whenever the KSM daemon is started; even if the range
+cannot contain any pages which KSM could actually merge; even if
+MADV_UNMERGEABLE is applied to a range which was never MADV_MERGEABLE.
+
+Like other madvise calls, they are intended for use on mapped areas of
+the user address space: they will report ENOMEM if the specified range
+includes unmapped gaps (though working on the intervening mapped areas),
+and might fail with EAGAIN if not enough memory for internal structures.
+
+Applications should be considerate in their use of MADV_MERGEABLE,
+restricting its use to areas likely to benefit. KSM's scans may use a lot
+of processing power: some installations will disable KSM for that reason.
+
+The KSM daemon is controlled by sysfs files in /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/,
+readable by all but writable only by root:
+
+pages_to_scan - how many present pages to scan before ksmd goes to sleep
+ e.g. "echo 100 > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_to_scan"
+ Default: 100 (chosen for demonstration purposes)
+
+sleep_millisecs - how many milliseconds ksmd should sleep before next scan
+ e.g. "echo 20 > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/sleep_millisecs"
+ Default: 20 (chosen for demonstration purposes)
+
+merge_across_nodes - specifies if pages from different numa nodes can be merged.
+ When set to 0, ksm merges only pages which physically
+ reside in the memory area of same NUMA node. That brings
+ lower latency to access of shared pages. Systems with more
+ nodes, at significant NUMA distances, are likely to benefit
+ from the lower latency of setting 0. Smaller systems, which
+ need to minimize memory usage, are likely to benefit from
+ the greater sharing of setting 1 (default). You may wish to
+ compare how your system performs under each setting, before
+ deciding on which to use. merge_across_nodes setting can be
+ changed only when there are no ksm shared pages in system:
+ set run 2 to unmerge pages first, then to 1 after changing
+ merge_across_nodes, to remerge according to the new setting.
+ Default: 1 (merging across nodes as in earlier releases)
+
+run - set 0 to stop ksmd from running but keep merged pages,
+ set 1 to run ksmd e.g. "echo 1 > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run",
+ set 2 to stop ksmd and unmerge all pages currently merged,
+ but leave mergeable areas registered for next run
+ Default: 0 (must be changed to 1 to activate KSM,
+ except if CONFIG_SYSFS is disabled)
+
+The effectiveness of KSM and MADV_MERGEABLE is shown in /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/:
+
+pages_shared - how many shared pages are being used
+pages_sharing - how many more sites are sharing them i.e. how much saved
+pages_unshared - how many pages unique but repeatedly checked for merging
+pages_volatile - how many pages changing too fast to be placed in a tree
+full_scans - how many times all mergeable areas have been scanned
+
+A high ratio of pages_sharing to pages_shared indicates good sharing, but
+a high ratio of pages_unshared to pages_sharing indicates wasted effort.
+pages_volatile embraces several different kinds of activity, but a high
+proportion there would also indicate poor use of madvise MADV_MERGEABLE.
+
+Izik Eidus,
+Hugh Dickins, 17 Nov 2009
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/numa b/kernel/Documentation/vm/numa
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..ade012742
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/numa
@@ -0,0 +1,149 @@
+Started Nov 1999 by Kanoj Sarcar <kanoj@sgi.com>
+
+What is NUMA?
+
+This question can be answered from a couple of perspectives: the
+hardware view and the Linux software view.
+
+From the hardware perspective, a NUMA system is a computer platform that
+comprises multiple components or assemblies each of which may contain 0
+or more CPUs, local memory, and/or IO buses. For brevity and to
+disambiguate the hardware view of these physical components/assemblies
+from the software abstraction thereof, we'll call the components/assemblies
+'cells' in this document.
+
+Each of the 'cells' may be viewed as an SMP [symmetric multi-processor] subset
+of the system--although some components necessary for a stand-alone SMP system
+may not be populated on any given cell. The cells of the NUMA system are
+connected together with some sort of system interconnect--e.g., a crossbar or
+point-to-point link are common types of NUMA system interconnects. Both of
+these types of interconnects can be aggregated to create NUMA platforms with
+cells at multiple distances from other cells.
+
+For Linux, the NUMA platforms of interest are primarily what is known as Cache
+Coherent NUMA or ccNUMA systems. With ccNUMA systems, all memory is visible
+to and accessible from any CPU attached to any cell and cache coherency
+is handled in hardware by the processor caches and/or the system interconnect.
+
+Memory access time and effective memory bandwidth varies depending on how far
+away the cell containing the CPU or IO bus making the memory access is from the
+cell containing the target memory. For example, access to memory by CPUs
+attached to the same cell will experience faster access times and higher
+bandwidths than accesses to memory on other, remote cells. NUMA platforms
+can have cells at multiple remote distances from any given cell.
+
+Platform vendors don't build NUMA systems just to make software developers'
+lives interesting. Rather, this architecture is a means to provide scalable
+memory bandwidth. However, to achieve scalable memory bandwidth, system and
+application software must arrange for a large majority of the memory references
+[cache misses] to be to "local" memory--memory on the same cell, if any--or
+to the closest cell with memory.
+
+This leads to the Linux software view of a NUMA system:
+
+Linux divides the system's hardware resources into multiple software
+abstractions called "nodes". Linux maps the nodes onto the physical cells
+of the hardware platform, abstracting away some of the details for some
+architectures. As with physical cells, software nodes may contain 0 or more
+CPUs, memory and/or IO buses. And, again, memory accesses to memory on
+"closer" nodes--nodes that map to closer cells--will generally experience
+faster access times and higher effective bandwidth than accesses to more
+remote cells.
+
+For some architectures, such as x86, Linux will "hide" any node representing a
+physical cell that has no memory attached, and reassign any CPUs attached to
+that cell to a node representing a cell that does have memory. Thus, on
+these architectures, one cannot assume that all CPUs that Linux associates with
+a given node will see the same local memory access times and bandwidth.
+
+In addition, for some architectures, again x86 is an example, Linux supports
+the emulation of additional nodes. For NUMA emulation, linux will carve up
+the existing nodes--or the system memory for non-NUMA platforms--into multiple
+nodes. Each emulated node will manage a fraction of the underlying cells'
+physical memory. NUMA emluation is useful for testing NUMA kernel and
+application features on non-NUMA platforms, and as a sort of memory resource
+management mechanism when used together with cpusets.
+[see Documentation/cgroups/cpusets.txt]
+
+For each node with memory, Linux constructs an independent memory management
+subsystem, complete with its own free page lists, in-use page lists, usage
+statistics and locks to mediate access. In addition, Linux constructs for
+each memory zone [one or more of DMA, DMA32, NORMAL, HIGH_MEMORY, MOVABLE],
+an ordered "zonelist". A zonelist specifies the zones/nodes to visit when a
+selected zone/node cannot satisfy the allocation request. This situation,
+when a zone has no available memory to satisfy a request, is called
+"overflow" or "fallback".
+
+Because some nodes contain multiple zones containing different types of
+memory, Linux must decide whether to order the zonelists such that allocations
+fall back to the same zone type on a different node, or to a different zone
+type on the same node. This is an important consideration because some zones,
+such as DMA or DMA32, represent relatively scarce resources. Linux chooses
+a default zonelist order based on the sizes of the various zone types relative
+to the total memory of the node and the total memory of the system. The
+default zonelist order may be overridden using the numa_zonelist_order kernel
+boot parameter or sysctl. [see Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt and
+Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt]
+
+By default, Linux will attempt to satisfy memory allocation requests from the
+node to which the CPU that executes the request is assigned. Specifically,
+Linux will attempt to allocate from the first node in the appropriate zonelist
+for the node where the request originates. This is called "local allocation."
+If the "local" node cannot satisfy the request, the kernel will examine other
+nodes' zones in the selected zonelist looking for the first zone in the list
+that can satisfy the request.
+
+Local allocation will tend to keep subsequent access to the allocated memory
+"local" to the underlying physical resources and off the system interconnect--
+as long as the task on whose behalf the kernel allocated some memory does not
+later migrate away from that memory. The Linux scheduler is aware of the
+NUMA topology of the platform--embodied in the "scheduling domains" data
+structures [see Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.txt]--and the scheduler
+attempts to minimize task migration to distant scheduling domains. However,
+the scheduler does not take a task's NUMA footprint into account directly.
+Thus, under sufficient imbalance, tasks can migrate between nodes, remote
+from their initial node and kernel data structures.
+
+System administrators and application designers can restrict a task's migration
+to improve NUMA locality using various CPU affinity command line interfaces,
+such as taskset(1) and numactl(1), and program interfaces such as
+sched_setaffinity(2). Further, one can modify the kernel's default local
+allocation behavior using Linux NUMA memory policy.
+[see Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt.]
+
+System administrators can restrict the CPUs and nodes' memories that a non-
+privileged user can specify in the scheduling or NUMA commands and functions
+using control groups and CPUsets. [see Documentation/cgroups/cpusets.txt]
+
+On architectures that do not hide memoryless nodes, Linux will include only
+zones [nodes] with memory in the zonelists. This means that for a memoryless
+node the "local memory node"--the node of the first zone in CPU's node's
+zonelist--will not be the node itself. Rather, it will be the node that the
+kernel selected as the nearest node with memory when it built the zonelists.
+So, default, local allocations will succeed with the kernel supplying the
+closest available memory. This is a consequence of the same mechanism that
+allows such allocations to fallback to other nearby nodes when a node that
+does contain memory overflows.
+
+Some kernel allocations do not want or cannot tolerate this allocation fallback
+behavior. Rather they want to be sure they get memory from the specified node
+or get notified that the node has no free memory. This is usually the case when
+a subsystem allocates per CPU memory resources, for example.
+
+A typical model for making such an allocation is to obtain the node id of the
+node to which the "current CPU" is attached using one of the kernel's
+numa_node_id() or CPU_to_node() functions and then request memory from only
+the node id returned. When such an allocation fails, the requesting subsystem
+may revert to its own fallback path. The slab kernel memory allocator is an
+example of this. Or, the subsystem may choose to disable or not to enable
+itself on allocation failure. The kernel profiling subsystem is an example of
+this.
+
+If the architecture supports--does not hide--memoryless nodes, then CPUs
+attached to memoryless nodes would always incur the fallback path overhead
+or some subsystems would fail to initialize if they attempted to allocated
+memory exclusively from a node without memory. To support such
+architectures transparently, kernel subsystems can use the numa_mem_id()
+or cpu_to_mem() function to locate the "local memory node" for the calling or
+specified CPU. Again, this is the same node from which default, local page
+allocations will be attempted.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..badb05076
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/numa_memory_policy.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,452 @@
+
+What is Linux Memory Policy?
+
+In the Linux kernel, "memory policy" determines from which node the kernel will
+allocate memory in a NUMA system or in an emulated NUMA system. Linux has
+supported platforms with Non-Uniform Memory Access architectures since 2.4.?.
+The current memory policy support was added to Linux 2.6 around May 2004. This
+document attempts to describe the concepts and APIs of the 2.6 memory policy
+support.
+
+Memory policies should not be confused with cpusets
+(Documentation/cgroups/cpusets.txt)
+which is an administrative mechanism for restricting the nodes from which
+memory may be allocated by a set of processes. Memory policies are a
+programming interface that a NUMA-aware application can take advantage of. When
+both cpusets and policies are applied to a task, the restrictions of the cpuset
+takes priority. See "MEMORY POLICIES AND CPUSETS" below for more details.
+
+MEMORY POLICY CONCEPTS
+
+Scope of Memory Policies
+
+The Linux kernel supports _scopes_ of memory policy, described here from
+most general to most specific:
+
+ System Default Policy: this policy is "hard coded" into the kernel. It
+ is the policy that governs all page allocations that aren't controlled
+ by one of the more specific policy scopes discussed below. When the
+ system is "up and running", the system default policy will use "local
+ allocation" described below. However, during boot up, the system
+ default policy will be set to interleave allocations across all nodes
+ with "sufficient" memory, so as not to overload the initial boot node
+ with boot-time allocations.
+
+ Task/Process Policy: this is an optional, per-task policy. When defined
+ for a specific task, this policy controls all page allocations made by or
+ on behalf of the task that aren't controlled by a more specific scope.
+ If a task does not define a task policy, then all page allocations that
+ would have been controlled by the task policy "fall back" to the System
+ Default Policy.
+
+ The task policy applies to the entire address space of a task. Thus,
+ it is inheritable, and indeed is inherited, across both fork()
+ [clone() w/o the CLONE_VM flag] and exec*(). This allows a parent task
+ to establish the task policy for a child task exec()'d from an
+ executable image that has no awareness of memory policy. See the
+ MEMORY POLICY APIS section, below, for an overview of the system call
+ that a task may use to set/change its task/process policy.
+
+ In a multi-threaded task, task policies apply only to the thread
+ [Linux kernel task] that installs the policy and any threads
+ subsequently created by that thread. Any sibling threads existing
+ at the time a new task policy is installed retain their current
+ policy.
+
+ A task policy applies only to pages allocated after the policy is
+ installed. Any pages already faulted in by the task when the task
+ changes its task policy remain where they were allocated based on
+ the policy at the time they were allocated.
+
+ VMA Policy: A "VMA" or "Virtual Memory Area" refers to a range of a task's
+ virtual address space. A task may define a specific policy for a range
+ of its virtual address space. See the MEMORY POLICIES APIS section,
+ below, for an overview of the mbind() system call used to set a VMA
+ policy.
+
+ A VMA policy will govern the allocation of pages that back this region of
+ the address space. Any regions of the task's address space that don't
+ have an explicit VMA policy will fall back to the task policy, which may
+ itself fall back to the System Default Policy.
+
+ VMA policies have a few complicating details:
+
+ VMA policy applies ONLY to anonymous pages. These include pages
+ allocated for anonymous segments, such as the task stack and heap, and
+ any regions of the address space mmap()ed with the MAP_ANONYMOUS flag.
+ If a VMA policy is applied to a file mapping, it will be ignored if
+ the mapping used the MAP_SHARED flag. If the file mapping used the
+ MAP_PRIVATE flag, the VMA policy will only be applied when an
+ anonymous page is allocated on an attempt to write to the mapping--
+ i.e., at Copy-On-Write.
+
+ VMA policies are shared between all tasks that share a virtual address
+ space--a.k.a. threads--independent of when the policy is installed; and
+ they are inherited across fork(). However, because VMA policies refer
+ to a specific region of a task's address space, and because the address
+ space is discarded and recreated on exec*(), VMA policies are NOT
+ inheritable across exec(). Thus, only NUMA-aware applications may
+ use VMA policies.
+
+ A task may install a new VMA policy on a sub-range of a previously
+ mmap()ed region. When this happens, Linux splits the existing virtual
+ memory area into 2 or 3 VMAs, each with it's own policy.
+
+ By default, VMA policy applies only to pages allocated after the policy
+ is installed. Any pages already faulted into the VMA range remain
+ where they were allocated based on the policy at the time they were
+ allocated. However, since 2.6.16, Linux supports page migration via
+ the mbind() system call, so that page contents can be moved to match
+ a newly installed policy.
+
+ Shared Policy: Conceptually, shared policies apply to "memory objects"
+ mapped shared into one or more tasks' distinct address spaces. An
+ application installs a shared policies the same way as VMA policies--using
+ the mbind() system call specifying a range of virtual addresses that map
+ the shared object. However, unlike VMA policies, which can be considered
+ to be an attribute of a range of a task's address space, shared policies
+ apply directly to the shared object. Thus, all tasks that attach to the
+ object share the policy, and all pages allocated for the shared object,
+ by any task, will obey the shared policy.
+
+ As of 2.6.22, only shared memory segments, created by shmget() or
+ mmap(MAP_ANONYMOUS|MAP_SHARED), support shared policy. When shared
+ policy support was added to Linux, the associated data structures were
+ added to hugetlbfs shmem segments. At the time, hugetlbfs did not
+ support allocation at fault time--a.k.a lazy allocation--so hugetlbfs
+ shmem segments were never "hooked up" to the shared policy support.
+ Although hugetlbfs segments now support lazy allocation, their support
+ for shared policy has not been completed.
+
+ As mentioned above [re: VMA policies], allocations of page cache
+ pages for regular files mmap()ed with MAP_SHARED ignore any VMA
+ policy installed on the virtual address range backed by the shared
+ file mapping. Rather, shared page cache pages, including pages backing
+ private mappings that have not yet been written by the task, follow
+ task policy, if any, else System Default Policy.
+
+ The shared policy infrastructure supports different policies on subset
+ ranges of the shared object. However, Linux still splits the VMA of
+ the task that installs the policy for each range of distinct policy.
+ Thus, different tasks that attach to a shared memory segment can have
+ different VMA configurations mapping that one shared object. This
+ can be seen by examining the /proc/<pid>/numa_maps of tasks sharing
+ a shared memory region, when one task has installed shared policy on
+ one or more ranges of the region.
+
+Components of Memory Policies
+
+ A Linux memory policy consists of a "mode", optional mode flags, and an
+ optional set of nodes. The mode determines the behavior of the policy,
+ the optional mode flags determine the behavior of the mode, and the
+ optional set of nodes can be viewed as the arguments to the policy
+ behavior.
+
+ Internally, memory policies are implemented by a reference counted
+ structure, struct mempolicy. Details of this structure will be discussed
+ in context, below, as required to explain the behavior.
+
+ Linux memory policy supports the following 4 behavioral modes:
+
+ Default Mode--MPOL_DEFAULT: This mode is only used in the memory
+ policy APIs. Internally, MPOL_DEFAULT is converted to the NULL
+ memory policy in all policy scopes. Any existing non-default policy
+ will simply be removed when MPOL_DEFAULT is specified. As a result,
+ MPOL_DEFAULT means "fall back to the next most specific policy scope."
+
+ For example, a NULL or default task policy will fall back to the
+ system default policy. A NULL or default vma policy will fall
+ back to the task policy.
+
+ When specified in one of the memory policy APIs, the Default mode
+ does not use the optional set of nodes.
+
+ It is an error for the set of nodes specified for this policy to
+ be non-empty.
+
+ MPOL_BIND: This mode specifies that memory must come from the
+ set of nodes specified by the policy. Memory will be allocated from
+ the node in the set with sufficient free memory that is closest to
+ the node where the allocation takes place.
+
+ MPOL_PREFERRED: This mode specifies that the allocation should be
+ attempted from the single node specified in the policy. If that
+ allocation fails, the kernel will search other nodes, in order of
+ increasing distance from the preferred node based on information
+ provided by the platform firmware.
+
+ Internally, the Preferred policy uses a single node--the
+ preferred_node member of struct mempolicy. When the internal
+ mode flag MPOL_F_LOCAL is set, the preferred_node is ignored and
+ the policy is interpreted as local allocation. "Local" allocation
+ policy can be viewed as a Preferred policy that starts at the node
+ containing the cpu where the allocation takes place.
+
+ It is possible for the user to specify that local allocation is
+ always preferred by passing an empty nodemask with this mode.
+ If an empty nodemask is passed, the policy cannot use the
+ MPOL_F_STATIC_NODES or MPOL_F_RELATIVE_NODES flags described
+ below.
+
+ MPOL_INTERLEAVED: This mode specifies that page allocations be
+ interleaved, on a page granularity, across the nodes specified in
+ the policy. This mode also behaves slightly differently, based on
+ the context where it is used:
+
+ For allocation of anonymous pages and shared memory pages,
+ Interleave mode indexes the set of nodes specified by the policy
+ using the page offset of the faulting address into the segment
+ [VMA] containing the address modulo the number of nodes specified
+ by the policy. It then attempts to allocate a page, starting at
+ the selected node, as if the node had been specified by a Preferred
+ policy or had been selected by a local allocation. That is,
+ allocation will follow the per node zonelist.
+
+ For allocation of page cache pages, Interleave mode indexes the set
+ of nodes specified by the policy using a node counter maintained
+ per task. This counter wraps around to the lowest specified node
+ after it reaches the highest specified node. This will tend to
+ spread the pages out over the nodes specified by the policy based
+ on the order in which they are allocated, rather than based on any
+ page offset into an address range or file. During system boot up,
+ the temporary interleaved system default policy works in this
+ mode.
+
+ Linux memory policy supports the following optional mode flags:
+
+ MPOL_F_STATIC_NODES: This flag specifies that the nodemask passed by
+ the user should not be remapped if the task or VMA's set of allowed
+ nodes changes after the memory policy has been defined.
+
+ Without this flag, anytime a mempolicy is rebound because of a
+ change in the set of allowed nodes, the node (Preferred) or
+ nodemask (Bind, Interleave) is remapped to the new set of
+ allowed nodes. This may result in nodes being used that were
+ previously undesired.
+
+ With this flag, if the user-specified nodes overlap with the
+ nodes allowed by the task's cpuset, then the memory policy is
+ applied to their intersection. If the two sets of nodes do not
+ overlap, the Default policy is used.
+
+ For example, consider a task that is attached to a cpuset with
+ mems 1-3 that sets an Interleave policy over the same set. If
+ the cpuset's mems change to 3-5, the Interleave will now occur
+ over nodes 3, 4, and 5. With this flag, however, since only node
+ 3 is allowed from the user's nodemask, the "interleave" only
+ occurs over that node. If no nodes from the user's nodemask are
+ now allowed, the Default behavior is used.
+
+ MPOL_F_STATIC_NODES cannot be combined with the
+ MPOL_F_RELATIVE_NODES flag. It also cannot be used for
+ MPOL_PREFERRED policies that were created with an empty nodemask
+ (local allocation).
+
+ MPOL_F_RELATIVE_NODES: This flag specifies that the nodemask passed
+ by the user will be mapped relative to the set of the task or VMA's
+ set of allowed nodes. The kernel stores the user-passed nodemask,
+ and if the allowed nodes changes, then that original nodemask will
+ be remapped relative to the new set of allowed nodes.
+
+ Without this flag (and without MPOL_F_STATIC_NODES), anytime a
+ mempolicy is rebound because of a change in the set of allowed
+ nodes, the node (Preferred) or nodemask (Bind, Interleave) is
+ remapped to the new set of allowed nodes. That remap may not
+ preserve the relative nature of the user's passed nodemask to its
+ set of allowed nodes upon successive rebinds: a nodemask of
+ 1,3,5 may be remapped to 7-9 and then to 1-3 if the set of
+ allowed nodes is restored to its original state.
+
+ With this flag, the remap is done so that the node numbers from
+ the user's passed nodemask are relative to the set of allowed
+ nodes. In other words, if nodes 0, 2, and 4 are set in the user's
+ nodemask, the policy will be effected over the first (and in the
+ Bind or Interleave case, the third and fifth) nodes in the set of
+ allowed nodes. The nodemask passed by the user represents nodes
+ relative to task or VMA's set of allowed nodes.
+
+ If the user's nodemask includes nodes that are outside the range
+ of the new set of allowed nodes (for example, node 5 is set in
+ the user's nodemask when the set of allowed nodes is only 0-3),
+ then the remap wraps around to the beginning of the nodemask and,
+ if not already set, sets the node in the mempolicy nodemask.
+
+ For example, consider a task that is attached to a cpuset with
+ mems 2-5 that sets an Interleave policy over the same set with
+ MPOL_F_RELATIVE_NODES. If the cpuset's mems change to 3-7, the
+ interleave now occurs over nodes 3,5-7. If the cpuset's mems
+ then change to 0,2-3,5, then the interleave occurs over nodes
+ 0,2-3,5.
+
+ Thanks to the consistent remapping, applications preparing
+ nodemasks to specify memory policies using this flag should
+ disregard their current, actual cpuset imposed memory placement
+ and prepare the nodemask as if they were always located on
+ memory nodes 0 to N-1, where N is the number of memory nodes the
+ policy is intended to manage. Let the kernel then remap to the
+ set of memory nodes allowed by the task's cpuset, as that may
+ change over time.
+
+ MPOL_F_RELATIVE_NODES cannot be combined with the
+ MPOL_F_STATIC_NODES flag. It also cannot be used for
+ MPOL_PREFERRED policies that were created with an empty nodemask
+ (local allocation).
+
+MEMORY POLICY REFERENCE COUNTING
+
+To resolve use/free races, struct mempolicy contains an atomic reference
+count field. Internal interfaces, mpol_get()/mpol_put() increment and
+decrement this reference count, respectively. mpol_put() will only free
+the structure back to the mempolicy kmem cache when the reference count
+goes to zero.
+
+When a new memory policy is allocated, its reference count is initialized
+to '1', representing the reference held by the task that is installing the
+new policy. When a pointer to a memory policy structure is stored in another
+structure, another reference is added, as the task's reference will be dropped
+on completion of the policy installation.
+
+During run-time "usage" of the policy, we attempt to minimize atomic operations
+on the reference count, as this can lead to cache lines bouncing between cpus
+and NUMA nodes. "Usage" here means one of the following:
+
+1) querying of the policy, either by the task itself [using the get_mempolicy()
+ API discussed below] or by another task using the /proc/<pid>/numa_maps
+ interface.
+
+2) examination of the policy to determine the policy mode and associated node
+ or node lists, if any, for page allocation. This is considered a "hot
+ path". Note that for MPOL_BIND, the "usage" extends across the entire
+ allocation process, which may sleep during page reclaimation, because the
+ BIND policy nodemask is used, by reference, to filter ineligible nodes.
+
+We can avoid taking an extra reference during the usages listed above as
+follows:
+
+1) we never need to get/free the system default policy as this is never
+ changed nor freed, once the system is up and running.
+
+2) for querying the policy, we do not need to take an extra reference on the
+ target task's task policy nor vma policies because we always acquire the
+ task's mm's mmap_sem for read during the query. The set_mempolicy() and
+ mbind() APIs [see below] always acquire the mmap_sem for write when
+ installing or replacing task or vma policies. Thus, there is no possibility
+ of a task or thread freeing a policy while another task or thread is
+ querying it.
+
+3) Page allocation usage of task or vma policy occurs in the fault path where
+ we hold them mmap_sem for read. Again, because replacing the task or vma
+ policy requires that the mmap_sem be held for write, the policy can't be
+ freed out from under us while we're using it for page allocation.
+
+4) Shared policies require special consideration. One task can replace a
+ shared memory policy while another task, with a distinct mmap_sem, is
+ querying or allocating a page based on the policy. To resolve this
+ potential race, the shared policy infrastructure adds an extra reference
+ to the shared policy during lookup while holding a spin lock on the shared
+ policy management structure. This requires that we drop this extra
+ reference when we're finished "using" the policy. We must drop the
+ extra reference on shared policies in the same query/allocation paths
+ used for non-shared policies. For this reason, shared policies are marked
+ as such, and the extra reference is dropped "conditionally"--i.e., only
+ for shared policies.
+
+ Because of this extra reference counting, and because we must lookup
+ shared policies in a tree structure under spinlock, shared policies are
+ more expensive to use in the page allocation path. This is especially
+ true for shared policies on shared memory regions shared by tasks running
+ on different NUMA nodes. This extra overhead can be avoided by always
+ falling back to task or system default policy for shared memory regions,
+ or by prefaulting the entire shared memory region into memory and locking
+ it down. However, this might not be appropriate for all applications.
+
+MEMORY POLICY APIs
+
+Linux supports 3 system calls for controlling memory policy. These APIS
+always affect only the calling task, the calling task's address space, or
+some shared object mapped into the calling task's address space.
+
+ Note: the headers that define these APIs and the parameter data types
+ for user space applications reside in a package that is not part of
+ the Linux kernel. The kernel system call interfaces, with the 'sys_'
+ prefix, are defined in <linux/syscalls.h>; the mode and flag
+ definitions are defined in <linux/mempolicy.h>.
+
+Set [Task] Memory Policy:
+
+ long set_mempolicy(int mode, const unsigned long *nmask,
+ unsigned long maxnode);
+
+ Set's the calling task's "task/process memory policy" to mode
+ specified by the 'mode' argument and the set of nodes defined
+ by 'nmask'. 'nmask' points to a bit mask of node ids containing
+ at least 'maxnode' ids. Optional mode flags may be passed by
+ combining the 'mode' argument with the flag (for example:
+ MPOL_INTERLEAVE | MPOL_F_STATIC_NODES).
+
+ See the set_mempolicy(2) man page for more details
+
+
+Get [Task] Memory Policy or Related Information
+
+ long get_mempolicy(int *mode,
+ const unsigned long *nmask, unsigned long maxnode,
+ void *addr, int flags);
+
+ Queries the "task/process memory policy" of the calling task, or
+ the policy or location of a specified virtual address, depending
+ on the 'flags' argument.
+
+ See the get_mempolicy(2) man page for more details
+
+
+Install VMA/Shared Policy for a Range of Task's Address Space
+
+ long mbind(void *start, unsigned long len, int mode,
+ const unsigned long *nmask, unsigned long maxnode,
+ unsigned flags);
+
+ mbind() installs the policy specified by (mode, nmask, maxnodes) as
+ a VMA policy for the range of the calling task's address space
+ specified by the 'start' and 'len' arguments. Additional actions
+ may be requested via the 'flags' argument.
+
+ See the mbind(2) man page for more details.
+
+MEMORY POLICY COMMAND LINE INTERFACE
+
+Although not strictly part of the Linux implementation of memory policy,
+a command line tool, numactl(8), exists that allows one to:
+
++ set the task policy for a specified program via set_mempolicy(2), fork(2) and
+ exec(2)
+
++ set the shared policy for a shared memory segment via mbind(2)
+
+The numactl(8) tool is packaged with the run-time version of the library
+containing the memory policy system call wrappers. Some distributions
+package the headers and compile-time libraries in a separate development
+package.
+
+
+MEMORY POLICIES AND CPUSETS
+
+Memory policies work within cpusets as described above. For memory policies
+that require a node or set of nodes, the nodes are restricted to the set of
+nodes whose memories are allowed by the cpuset constraints. If the nodemask
+specified for the policy contains nodes that are not allowed by the cpuset and
+MPOL_F_RELATIVE_NODES is not used, the intersection of the set of nodes
+specified for the policy and the set of nodes with memory is used. If the
+result is the empty set, the policy is considered invalid and cannot be
+installed. If MPOL_F_RELATIVE_NODES is used, the policy's nodes are mapped
+onto and folded into the task's set of allowed nodes as previously described.
+
+The interaction of memory policies and cpusets can be problematic when tasks
+in two cpusets share access to a memory region, such as shared memory segments
+created by shmget() of mmap() with the MAP_ANONYMOUS and MAP_SHARED flags, and
+any of the tasks install shared policy on the region, only nodes whose
+memories are allowed in both cpusets may be used in the policies. Obtaining
+this information requires "stepping outside" the memory policy APIs to use the
+cpuset information and requires that one know in what cpusets other task might
+be attaching to the shared region. Furthermore, if the cpusets' allowed
+memory sets are disjoint, "local" allocation is the only valid policy.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting b/kernel/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..cbfaaa674
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting
@@ -0,0 +1,80 @@
+The Linux kernel supports the following overcommit handling modes
+
+0 - Heuristic overcommit handling. Obvious overcommits of
+ address space are refused. Used for a typical system. It
+ ensures a seriously wild allocation fails while allowing
+ overcommit to reduce swap usage. root is allowed to
+ allocate slightly more memory in this mode. This is the
+ default.
+
+1 - Always overcommit. Appropriate for some scientific
+ applications. Classic example is code using sparse arrays
+ and just relying on the virtual memory consisting almost
+ entirely of zero pages.
+
+2 - Don't overcommit. The total address space commit
+ for the system is not permitted to exceed swap + a
+ configurable amount (default is 50%) of physical RAM.
+ Depending on the amount you use, in most situations
+ this means a process will not be killed while accessing
+ pages but will receive errors on memory allocation as
+ appropriate.
+
+ Useful for applications that want to guarantee their
+ memory allocations will be available in the future
+ without having to initialize every page.
+
+The overcommit policy is set via the sysctl `vm.overcommit_memory'.
+
+The overcommit amount can be set via `vm.overcommit_ratio' (percentage)
+or `vm.overcommit_kbytes' (absolute value).
+
+The current overcommit limit and amount committed are viewable in
+/proc/meminfo as CommitLimit and Committed_AS respectively.
+
+Gotchas
+-------
+
+The C language stack growth does an implicit mremap. If you want absolute
+guarantees and run close to the edge you MUST mmap your stack for the
+largest size you think you will need. For typical stack usage this does
+not matter much but it's a corner case if you really really care
+
+In mode 2 the MAP_NORESERVE flag is ignored.
+
+
+How It Works
+------------
+
+The overcommit is based on the following rules
+
+For a file backed map
+ SHARED or READ-only - 0 cost (the file is the map not swap)
+ PRIVATE WRITABLE - size of mapping per instance
+
+For an anonymous or /dev/zero map
+ SHARED - size of mapping
+ PRIVATE READ-only - 0 cost (but of little use)
+ PRIVATE WRITABLE - size of mapping per instance
+
+Additional accounting
+ Pages made writable copies by mmap
+ shmfs memory drawn from the same pool
+
+Status
+------
+
+o We account mmap memory mappings
+o We account mprotect changes in commit
+o We account mremap changes in size
+o We account brk
+o We account munmap
+o We report the commit status in /proc
+o Account and check on fork
+o Review stack handling/building on exec
+o SHMfs accounting
+o Implement actual limit enforcement
+
+To Do
+-----
+o Account ptrace pages (this is hard)
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/page_migration b/kernel/Documentation/vm/page_migration
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..6513fe2d9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/page_migration
@@ -0,0 +1,149 @@
+Page migration
+--------------
+
+Page migration allows the moving of the physical location of pages between
+nodes in a numa system while the process is running. This means that the
+virtual addresses that the process sees do not change. However, the
+system rearranges the physical location of those pages.
+
+The main intend of page migration is to reduce the latency of memory access
+by moving pages near to the processor where the process accessing that memory
+is running.
+
+Page migration allows a process to manually relocate the node on which its
+pages are located through the MF_MOVE and MF_MOVE_ALL options while setting
+a new memory policy via mbind(). The pages of process can also be relocated
+from another process using the sys_migrate_pages() function call. The
+migrate_pages function call takes two sets of nodes and moves pages of a
+process that are located on the from nodes to the destination nodes.
+Page migration functions are provided by the numactl package by Andi Kleen
+(a version later than 0.9.3 is required. Get it from
+ftp://oss.sgi.com/www/projects/libnuma/download/). numactl provides libnuma
+which provides an interface similar to other numa functionality for page
+migration. cat /proc/<pid>/numa_maps allows an easy review of where the
+pages of a process are located. See also the numa_maps documentation in the
+proc(5) man page.
+
+Manual migration is useful if for example the scheduler has relocated
+a process to a processor on a distant node. A batch scheduler or an
+administrator may detect the situation and move the pages of the process
+nearer to the new processor. The kernel itself does only provide
+manual page migration support. Automatic page migration may be implemented
+through user space processes that move pages. A special function call
+"move_pages" allows the moving of individual pages within a process.
+A NUMA profiler may f.e. obtain a log showing frequent off node
+accesses and may use the result to move pages to more advantageous
+locations.
+
+Larger installations usually partition the system using cpusets into
+sections of nodes. Paul Jackson has equipped cpusets with the ability to
+move pages when a task is moved to another cpuset (See
+Documentation/cgroups/cpusets.txt).
+Cpusets allows the automation of process locality. If a task is moved to
+a new cpuset then also all its pages are moved with it so that the
+performance of the process does not sink dramatically. Also the pages
+of processes in a cpuset are moved if the allowed memory nodes of a
+cpuset are changed.
+
+Page migration allows the preservation of the relative location of pages
+within a group of nodes for all migration techniques which will preserve a
+particular memory allocation pattern generated even after migrating a
+process. This is necessary in order to preserve the memory latencies.
+Processes will run with similar performance after migration.
+
+Page migration occurs in several steps. First a high level
+description for those trying to use migrate_pages() from the kernel
+(for userspace usage see the Andi Kleen's numactl package mentioned above)
+and then a low level description of how the low level details work.
+
+A. In kernel use of migrate_pages()
+-----------------------------------
+
+1. Remove pages from the LRU.
+
+ Lists of pages to be migrated are generated by scanning over
+ pages and moving them into lists. This is done by
+ calling isolate_lru_page().
+ Calling isolate_lru_page increases the references to the page
+ so that it cannot vanish while the page migration occurs.
+ It also prevents the swapper or other scans to encounter
+ the page.
+
+2. We need to have a function of type new_page_t that can be
+ passed to migrate_pages(). This function should figure out
+ how to allocate the correct new page given the old page.
+
+3. The migrate_pages() function is called which attempts
+ to do the migration. It will call the function to allocate
+ the new page for each page that is considered for
+ moving.
+
+B. How migrate_pages() works
+----------------------------
+
+migrate_pages() does several passes over its list of pages. A page is moved
+if all references to a page are removable at the time. The page has
+already been removed from the LRU via isolate_lru_page() and the refcount
+is increased so that the page cannot be freed while page migration occurs.
+
+Steps:
+
+1. Lock the page to be migrated
+
+2. Insure that writeback is complete.
+
+3. Prep the new page that we want to move to. It is locked
+ and set to not being uptodate so that all accesses to the new
+ page immediately lock while the move is in progress.
+
+4. The new page is prepped with some settings from the old page so that
+ accesses to the new page will discover a page with the correct settings.
+
+5. All the page table references to the page are converted
+ to migration entries or dropped (nonlinear vmas).
+ This decrease the mapcount of a page. If the resulting
+ mapcount is not zero then we do not migrate the page.
+ All user space processes that attempt to access the page
+ will now wait on the page lock.
+
+6. The radix tree lock is taken. This will cause all processes trying
+ to access the page via the mapping to block on the radix tree spinlock.
+
+7. The refcount of the page is examined and we back out if references remain
+ otherwise we know that we are the only one referencing this page.
+
+8. The radix tree is checked and if it does not contain the pointer to this
+ page then we back out because someone else modified the radix tree.
+
+9. The radix tree is changed to point to the new page.
+
+10. The reference count of the old page is dropped because the radix tree
+ reference is gone. A reference to the new page is established because
+ the new page is referenced to by the radix tree.
+
+11. The radix tree lock is dropped. With that lookups in the mapping
+ become possible again. Processes will move from spinning on the tree_lock
+ to sleeping on the locked new page.
+
+12. The page contents are copied to the new page.
+
+13. The remaining page flags are copied to the new page.
+
+14. The old page flags are cleared to indicate that the page does
+ not provide any information anymore.
+
+15. Queued up writeback on the new page is triggered.
+
+16. If migration entries were page then replace them with real ptes. Doing
+ so will enable access for user space processes not already waiting for
+ the page lock.
+
+19. The page locks are dropped from the old and new page.
+ Processes waiting on the page lock will redo their page faults
+ and will reach the new page.
+
+20. The new page is moved to the LRU and can be scanned by the swapper
+ etc again.
+
+Christoph Lameter, May 8, 2006.
+
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/page_owner.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/page_owner.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..8f3ce9b3a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/page_owner.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,81 @@
+page owner: Tracking about who allocated each page
+-----------------------------------------------------------
+
+* Introduction
+
+page owner is for the tracking about who allocated each page.
+It can be used to debug memory leak or to find a memory hogger.
+When allocation happens, information about allocation such as call stack
+and order of pages is stored into certain storage for each page.
+When we need to know about status of all pages, we can get and analyze
+this information.
+
+Although we already have tracepoint for tracing page allocation/free,
+using it for analyzing who allocate each page is rather complex. We need
+to enlarge the trace buffer for preventing overlapping until userspace
+program launched. And, launched program continually dump out the trace
+buffer for later analysis and it would change system behviour with more
+possibility rather than just keeping it in memory, so bad for debugging.
+
+page owner can also be used for various purposes. For example, accurate
+fragmentation statistics can be obtained through gfp flag information of
+each page. It is already implemented and activated if page owner is
+enabled. Other usages are more than welcome.
+
+page owner is disabled in default. So, if you'd like to use it, you need
+to add "page_owner=on" into your boot cmdline. If the kernel is built
+with page owner and page owner is disabled in runtime due to no enabling
+boot option, runtime overhead is marginal. If disabled in runtime, it
+doesn't require memory to store owner information, so there is no runtime
+memory overhead. And, page owner inserts just two unlikely branches into
+the page allocator hotpath and if it returns false then allocation is
+done like as the kernel without page owner. These two unlikely branches
+would not affect to allocation performance. Following is the kernel's
+code size change due to this facility.
+
+- Without page owner
+ text data bss dec hex filename
+ 40662 1493 644 42799 a72f mm/page_alloc.o
+
+- With page owner
+ text data bss dec hex filename
+ 40892 1493 644 43029 a815 mm/page_alloc.o
+ 1427 24 8 1459 5b3 mm/page_ext.o
+ 2722 50 0 2772 ad4 mm/page_owner.o
+
+Although, roughly, 4 KB code is added in total, page_alloc.o increase by
+230 bytes and only half of it is in hotpath. Building the kernel with
+page owner and turning it on if needed would be great option to debug
+kernel memory problem.
+
+There is one notice that is caused by implementation detail. page owner
+stores information into the memory from struct page extension. This memory
+is initialized some time later than that page allocator starts in sparse
+memory system, so, until initialization, many pages can be allocated and
+they would have no owner information. To fix it up, these early allocated
+pages are investigated and marked as allocated in initialization phase.
+Although it doesn't mean that they have the right owner information,
+at least, we can tell whether the page is allocated or not,
+more accurately. On 2GB memory x86-64 VM box, 13343 early allocated pages
+are catched and marked, although they are mostly allocated from struct
+page extension feature. Anyway, after that, no page is left in
+un-tracking state.
+
+* Usage
+
+1) Build user-space helper
+ cd tools/vm
+ make page_owner_sort
+
+2) Enable page owner
+ Add "page_owner=on" to boot cmdline.
+
+3) Do the job what you want to debug
+
+4) Analyze information from page owner
+ cat /sys/kernel/debug/page_owner > page_owner_full.txt
+ grep -v ^PFN page_owner_full.txt > page_owner.txt
+ ./page_owner_sort page_owner.txt sorted_page_owner.txt
+
+ See the result about who allocated each page
+ in the sorted_page_owner.txt.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..6bfbc172c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/pagemap.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,161 @@
+pagemap, from the userspace perspective
+---------------------------------------
+
+pagemap is a new (as of 2.6.25) set of interfaces in the kernel that allow
+userspace programs to examine the page tables and related information by
+reading files in /proc.
+
+There are three components to pagemap:
+
+ * /proc/pid/pagemap. This file lets a userspace process find out which
+ physical frame each virtual page is mapped to. It contains one 64-bit
+ value for each virtual page, containing the following data (from
+ fs/proc/task_mmu.c, above pagemap_read):
+
+ * Bits 0-54 page frame number (PFN) if present
+ * Bits 0-4 swap type if swapped
+ * Bits 5-54 swap offset if swapped
+ * Bit 55 pte is soft-dirty (see Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt)
+ * Bits 56-60 zero
+ * Bit 61 page is file-page or shared-anon
+ * Bit 62 page swapped
+ * Bit 63 page present
+
+ If the page is not present but in swap, then the PFN contains an
+ encoding of the swap file number and the page's offset into the
+ swap. Unmapped pages return a null PFN. This allows determining
+ precisely which pages are mapped (or in swap) and comparing mapped
+ pages between processes.
+
+ Efficient users of this interface will use /proc/pid/maps to
+ determine which areas of memory are actually mapped and llseek to
+ skip over unmapped regions.
+
+ * /proc/kpagecount. This file contains a 64-bit count of the number of
+ times each page is mapped, indexed by PFN.
+
+ * /proc/kpageflags. This file contains a 64-bit set of flags for each
+ page, indexed by PFN.
+
+ The flags are (from fs/proc/page.c, above kpageflags_read):
+
+ 0. LOCKED
+ 1. ERROR
+ 2. REFERENCED
+ 3. UPTODATE
+ 4. DIRTY
+ 5. LRU
+ 6. ACTIVE
+ 7. SLAB
+ 8. WRITEBACK
+ 9. RECLAIM
+ 10. BUDDY
+ 11. MMAP
+ 12. ANON
+ 13. SWAPCACHE
+ 14. SWAPBACKED
+ 15. COMPOUND_HEAD
+ 16. COMPOUND_TAIL
+ 16. HUGE
+ 18. UNEVICTABLE
+ 19. HWPOISON
+ 20. NOPAGE
+ 21. KSM
+ 22. THP
+ 23. BALLOON
+ 24. ZERO_PAGE
+
+Short descriptions to the page flags:
+
+ 0. LOCKED
+ page is being locked for exclusive access, eg. by undergoing read/write IO
+
+ 7. SLAB
+ page is managed by the SLAB/SLOB/SLUB/SLQB kernel memory allocator
+ When compound page is used, SLUB/SLQB will only set this flag on the head
+ page; SLOB will not flag it at all.
+
+10. BUDDY
+ a free memory block managed by the buddy system allocator
+ The buddy system organizes free memory in blocks of various orders.
+ An order N block has 2^N physically contiguous pages, with the BUDDY flag
+ set for and _only_ for the first page.
+
+15. COMPOUND_HEAD
+16. COMPOUND_TAIL
+ A compound page with order N consists of 2^N physically contiguous pages.
+ A compound page with order 2 takes the form of "HTTT", where H donates its
+ head page and T donates its tail page(s). The major consumers of compound
+ pages are hugeTLB pages (Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt), the SLUB etc.
+ memory allocators and various device drivers. However in this interface,
+ only huge/giga pages are made visible to end users.
+17. HUGE
+ this is an integral part of a HugeTLB page
+
+19. HWPOISON
+ hardware detected memory corruption on this page: don't touch the data!
+
+20. NOPAGE
+ no page frame exists at the requested address
+
+21. KSM
+ identical memory pages dynamically shared between one or more processes
+
+22. THP
+ contiguous pages which construct transparent hugepages
+
+23. BALLOON
+ balloon compaction page
+
+24. ZERO_PAGE
+ zero page for pfn_zero or huge_zero page
+
+ [IO related page flags]
+ 1. ERROR IO error occurred
+ 3. UPTODATE page has up-to-date data
+ ie. for file backed page: (in-memory data revision >= on-disk one)
+ 4. DIRTY page has been written to, hence contains new data
+ ie. for file backed page: (in-memory data revision > on-disk one)
+ 8. WRITEBACK page is being synced to disk
+
+ [LRU related page flags]
+ 5. LRU page is in one of the LRU lists
+ 6. ACTIVE page is in the active LRU list
+18. UNEVICTABLE page is in the unevictable (non-)LRU list
+ It is somehow pinned and not a candidate for LRU page reclaims,
+ eg. ramfs pages, shmctl(SHM_LOCK) and mlock() memory segments
+ 2. REFERENCED page has been referenced since last LRU list enqueue/requeue
+ 9. RECLAIM page will be reclaimed soon after its pageout IO completed
+11. MMAP a memory mapped page
+12. ANON a memory mapped page that is not part of a file
+13. SWAPCACHE page is mapped to swap space, ie. has an associated swap entry
+14. SWAPBACKED page is backed by swap/RAM
+
+The page-types tool in the tools/vm directory can be used to query the
+above flags.
+
+Using pagemap to do something useful:
+
+The general procedure for using pagemap to find out about a process' memory
+usage goes like this:
+
+ 1. Read /proc/pid/maps to determine which parts of the memory space are
+ mapped to what.
+ 2. Select the maps you are interested in -- all of them, or a particular
+ library, or the stack or the heap, etc.
+ 3. Open /proc/pid/pagemap and seek to the pages you would like to examine.
+ 4. Read a u64 for each page from pagemap.
+ 5. Open /proc/kpagecount and/or /proc/kpageflags. For each PFN you just
+ read, seek to that entry in the file, and read the data you want.
+
+For example, to find the "unique set size" (USS), which is the amount of
+memory that a process is using that is not shared with any other process,
+you can go through every map in the process, find the PFNs, look those up
+in kpagecount, and tally up the number of pages that are only referenced
+once.
+
+Other notes:
+
+Reading from any of the files will return -EINVAL if you are not starting
+the read on an 8-byte boundary (e.g., if you sought an odd number of bytes
+into the file), or if the size of the read is not a multiple of 8 bytes.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..f609142f4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/remap_file_pages.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+The remap_file_pages() system call is used to create a nonlinear mapping,
+that is, a mapping in which the pages of the file are mapped into a
+nonsequential order in memory. The advantage of using remap_file_pages()
+over using repeated calls to mmap(2) is that the former approach does not
+require the kernel to create additional VMA (Virtual Memory Area) data
+structures.
+
+Supporting of nonlinear mapping requires significant amount of non-trivial
+code in kernel virtual memory subsystem including hot paths. Also to get
+nonlinear mapping work kernel need a way to distinguish normal page table
+entries from entries with file offset (pte_file). Kernel reserves flag in
+PTE for this purpose. PTE flags are scarce resource especially on some CPU
+architectures. It would be nice to free up the flag for other usage.
+
+Fortunately, there are not many users of remap_file_pages() in the wild.
+It's only known that one enterprise RDBMS implementation uses the syscall
+on 32-bit systems to map files bigger than can linearly fit into 32-bit
+virtual address space. This use-case is not critical anymore since 64-bit
+systems are widely available.
+
+The syscall is deprecated and replaced it with an emulation now. The
+emulation creates new VMAs instead of nonlinear mappings. It's going to
+work slower for rare users of remap_file_pages() but ABI is preserved.
+
+One side effect of emulation (apart from performance) is that user can hit
+vm.max_map_count limit more easily due to additional VMAs. See comment for
+DEFAULT_MAX_MAP_COUNT for more details on the limit.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/slub.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/slub.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..b0c6d1bbb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/slub.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,283 @@
+Short users guide for SLUB
+--------------------------
+
+The basic philosophy of SLUB is very different from SLAB. SLAB
+requires rebuilding the kernel to activate debug options for all
+slab caches. SLUB always includes full debugging but it is off by default.
+SLUB can enable debugging only for selected slabs in order to avoid
+an impact on overall system performance which may make a bug more
+difficult to find.
+
+In order to switch debugging on one can add a option "slub_debug"
+to the kernel command line. That will enable full debugging for
+all slabs.
+
+Typically one would then use the "slabinfo" command to get statistical
+data and perform operation on the slabs. By default slabinfo only lists
+slabs that have data in them. See "slabinfo -h" for more options when
+running the command. slabinfo can be compiled with
+
+gcc -o slabinfo tools/vm/slabinfo.c
+
+Some of the modes of operation of slabinfo require that slub debugging
+be enabled on the command line. F.e. no tracking information will be
+available without debugging on and validation can only partially
+be performed if debugging was not switched on.
+
+Some more sophisticated uses of slub_debug:
+-------------------------------------------
+
+Parameters may be given to slub_debug. If none is specified then full
+debugging is enabled. Format:
+
+slub_debug=<Debug-Options> Enable options for all slabs
+slub_debug=<Debug-Options>,<slab name>
+ Enable options only for select slabs
+
+Possible debug options are
+ F Sanity checks on (enables SLAB_DEBUG_FREE. Sorry
+ SLAB legacy issues)
+ Z Red zoning
+ P Poisoning (object and padding)
+ U User tracking (free and alloc)
+ T Trace (please only use on single slabs)
+ A Toggle failslab filter mark for the cache
+ O Switch debugging off for caches that would have
+ caused higher minimum slab orders
+ - Switch all debugging off (useful if the kernel is
+ configured with CONFIG_SLUB_DEBUG_ON)
+
+F.e. in order to boot just with sanity checks and red zoning one would specify:
+
+ slub_debug=FZ
+
+Trying to find an issue in the dentry cache? Try
+
+ slub_debug=,dentry
+
+to only enable debugging on the dentry cache.
+
+Red zoning and tracking may realign the slab. We can just apply sanity checks
+to the dentry cache with
+
+ slub_debug=F,dentry
+
+Debugging options may require the minimum possible slab order to increase as
+a result of storing the metadata (for example, caches with PAGE_SIZE object
+sizes). This has a higher liklihood of resulting in slab allocation errors
+in low memory situations or if there's high fragmentation of memory. To
+switch off debugging for such caches by default, use
+
+ slub_debug=O
+
+In case you forgot to enable debugging on the kernel command line: It is
+possible to enable debugging manually when the kernel is up. Look at the
+contents of:
+
+/sys/kernel/slab/<slab name>/
+
+Look at the writable files. Writing 1 to them will enable the
+corresponding debug option. All options can be set on a slab that does
+not contain objects. If the slab already contains objects then sanity checks
+and tracing may only be enabled. The other options may cause the realignment
+of objects.
+
+Careful with tracing: It may spew out lots of information and never stop if
+used on the wrong slab.
+
+Slab merging
+------------
+
+If no debug options are specified then SLUB may merge similar slabs together
+in order to reduce overhead and increase cache hotness of objects.
+slabinfo -a displays which slabs were merged together.
+
+Slab validation
+---------------
+
+SLUB can validate all object if the kernel was booted with slub_debug. In
+order to do so you must have the slabinfo tool. Then you can do
+
+slabinfo -v
+
+which will test all objects. Output will be generated to the syslog.
+
+This also works in a more limited way if boot was without slab debug.
+In that case slabinfo -v simply tests all reachable objects. Usually
+these are in the cpu slabs and the partial slabs. Full slabs are not
+tracked by SLUB in a non debug situation.
+
+Getting more performance
+------------------------
+
+To some degree SLUB's performance is limited by the need to take the
+list_lock once in a while to deal with partial slabs. That overhead is
+governed by the order of the allocation for each slab. The allocations
+can be influenced by kernel parameters:
+
+slub_min_objects=x (default 4)
+slub_min_order=x (default 0)
+slub_max_order=x (default 3 (PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER))
+
+slub_min_objects allows to specify how many objects must at least fit
+into one slab in order for the allocation order to be acceptable.
+In general slub will be able to perform this number of allocations
+on a slab without consulting centralized resources (list_lock) where
+contention may occur.
+
+slub_min_order specifies a minim order of slabs. A similar effect like
+slub_min_objects.
+
+slub_max_order specified the order at which slub_min_objects should no
+longer be checked. This is useful to avoid SLUB trying to generate
+super large order pages to fit slub_min_objects of a slab cache with
+large object sizes into one high order page. Setting command line
+parameter debug_guardpage_minorder=N (N > 0), forces setting
+slub_max_order to 0, what cause minimum possible order of slabs
+allocation.
+
+SLUB Debug output
+-----------------
+
+Here is a sample of slub debug output:
+
+====================================================================
+BUG kmalloc-8: Redzone overwritten
+--------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+INFO: 0xc90f6d28-0xc90f6d2b. First byte 0x00 instead of 0xcc
+INFO: Slab 0xc528c530 flags=0x400000c3 inuse=61 fp=0xc90f6d58
+INFO: Object 0xc90f6d20 @offset=3360 fp=0xc90f6d58
+INFO: Allocated in get_modalias+0x61/0xf5 age=53 cpu=1 pid=554
+
+Bytes b4 0xc90f6d10: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a ........ZZZZZZZZ
+ Object 0xc90f6d20: 31 30 31 39 2e 30 30 35 1019.005
+ Redzone 0xc90f6d28: 00 cc cc cc .
+ Padding 0xc90f6d50: 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a ZZZZZZZZ
+
+ [<c010523d>] dump_trace+0x63/0x1eb
+ [<c01053df>] show_trace_log_lvl+0x1a/0x2f
+ [<c010601d>] show_trace+0x12/0x14
+ [<c0106035>] dump_stack+0x16/0x18
+ [<c017e0fa>] object_err+0x143/0x14b
+ [<c017e2cc>] check_object+0x66/0x234
+ [<c017eb43>] __slab_free+0x239/0x384
+ [<c017f446>] kfree+0xa6/0xc6
+ [<c02e2335>] get_modalias+0xb9/0xf5
+ [<c02e23b7>] dmi_dev_uevent+0x27/0x3c
+ [<c027866a>] dev_uevent+0x1ad/0x1da
+ [<c0205024>] kobject_uevent_env+0x20a/0x45b
+ [<c020527f>] kobject_uevent+0xa/0xf
+ [<c02779f1>] store_uevent+0x4f/0x58
+ [<c027758e>] dev_attr_store+0x29/0x2f
+ [<c01bec4f>] sysfs_write_file+0x16e/0x19c
+ [<c0183ba7>] vfs_write+0xd1/0x15a
+ [<c01841d7>] sys_write+0x3d/0x72
+ [<c0104112>] sysenter_past_esp+0x5f/0x99
+ [<b7f7b410>] 0xb7f7b410
+ =======================
+
+FIX kmalloc-8: Restoring Redzone 0xc90f6d28-0xc90f6d2b=0xcc
+
+If SLUB encounters a corrupted object (full detection requires the kernel
+to be booted with slub_debug) then the following output will be dumped
+into the syslog:
+
+1. Description of the problem encountered
+
+This will be a message in the system log starting with
+
+===============================================
+BUG <slab cache affected>: <What went wrong>
+-----------------------------------------------
+
+INFO: <corruption start>-<corruption_end> <more info>
+INFO: Slab <address> <slab information>
+INFO: Object <address> <object information>
+INFO: Allocated in <kernel function> age=<jiffies since alloc> cpu=<allocated by
+ cpu> pid=<pid of the process>
+INFO: Freed in <kernel function> age=<jiffies since free> cpu=<freed by cpu>
+ pid=<pid of the process>
+
+(Object allocation / free information is only available if SLAB_STORE_USER is
+set for the slab. slub_debug sets that option)
+
+2. The object contents if an object was involved.
+
+Various types of lines can follow the BUG SLUB line:
+
+Bytes b4 <address> : <bytes>
+ Shows a few bytes before the object where the problem was detected.
+ Can be useful if the corruption does not stop with the start of the
+ object.
+
+Object <address> : <bytes>
+ The bytes of the object. If the object is inactive then the bytes
+ typically contain poison values. Any non-poison value shows a
+ corruption by a write after free.
+
+Redzone <address> : <bytes>
+ The Redzone following the object. The Redzone is used to detect
+ writes after the object. All bytes should always have the same
+ value. If there is any deviation then it is due to a write after
+ the object boundary.
+
+ (Redzone information is only available if SLAB_RED_ZONE is set.
+ slub_debug sets that option)
+
+Padding <address> : <bytes>
+ Unused data to fill up the space in order to get the next object
+ properly aligned. In the debug case we make sure that there are
+ at least 4 bytes of padding. This allows the detection of writes
+ before the object.
+
+3. A stackdump
+
+The stackdump describes the location where the error was detected. The cause
+of the corruption is may be more likely found by looking at the function that
+allocated or freed the object.
+
+4. Report on how the problem was dealt with in order to ensure the continued
+operation of the system.
+
+These are messages in the system log beginning with
+
+FIX <slab cache affected>: <corrective action taken>
+
+In the above sample SLUB found that the Redzone of an active object has
+been overwritten. Here a string of 8 characters was written into a slab that
+has the length of 8 characters. However, a 8 character string needs a
+terminating 0. That zero has overwritten the first byte of the Redzone field.
+After reporting the details of the issue encountered the FIX SLUB message
+tells us that SLUB has restored the Redzone to its proper value and then
+system operations continue.
+
+Emergency operations:
+---------------------
+
+Minimal debugging (sanity checks alone) can be enabled by booting with
+
+ slub_debug=F
+
+This will be generally be enough to enable the resiliency features of slub
+which will keep the system running even if a bad kernel component will
+keep corrupting objects. This may be important for production systems.
+Performance will be impacted by the sanity checks and there will be a
+continual stream of error messages to the syslog but no additional memory
+will be used (unlike full debugging).
+
+No guarantees. The kernel component still needs to be fixed. Performance
+may be optimized further by locating the slab that experiences corruption
+and enabling debugging only for that cache
+
+I.e.
+
+ slub_debug=F,dentry
+
+If the corruption occurs by writing after the end of the object then it
+may be advisable to enable a Redzone to avoid corrupting the beginning
+of other objects.
+
+ slub_debug=FZ,dentry
+
+Christoph Lameter, May 30, 2007
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..55684d11a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+ SOFT-DIRTY PTEs
+
+ The soft-dirty is a bit on a PTE which helps to track which pages a task
+writes to. In order to do this tracking one should
+
+ 1. Clear soft-dirty bits from the task's PTEs.
+
+ This is done by writing "4" into the /proc/PID/clear_refs file of the
+ task in question.
+
+ 2. Wait some time.
+
+ 3. Read soft-dirty bits from the PTEs.
+
+ This is done by reading from the /proc/PID/pagemap. The bit 55 of the
+ 64-bit qword is the soft-dirty one. If set, the respective PTE was
+ written to since step 1.
+
+
+ Internally, to do this tracking, the writable bit is cleared from PTEs
+when the soft-dirty bit is cleared. So, after this, when the task tries to
+modify a page at some virtual address the #PF occurs and the kernel sets
+the soft-dirty bit on the respective PTE.
+
+ Note, that although all the task's address space is marked as r/o after the
+soft-dirty bits clear, the #PF-s that occur after that are processed fast.
+This is so, since the pages are still mapped to physical memory, and thus all
+the kernel does is finds this fact out and puts both writable and soft-dirty
+bits on the PTE.
+
+ While in most cases tracking memory changes by #PF-s is more than enough
+there is still a scenario when we can lose soft dirty bits -- a task
+unmaps a previously mapped memory region and then maps a new one at exactly
+the same place. When unmap is called, the kernel internally clears PTE values
+including soft dirty bits. To notify user space application about such
+memory region renewal the kernel always marks new memory regions (and
+expanded regions) as soft dirty.
+
+ This feature is actively used by the checkpoint-restore project. You
+can find more details about it on http://criu.org
+
+
+-- Pavel Emelyanov, Apr 9, 2013
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/split_page_table_lock b/kernel/Documentation/vm/split_page_table_lock
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..6dea4fd5c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/split_page_table_lock
@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+Split page table lock
+=====================
+
+Originally, mm->page_table_lock spinlock protected all page tables of the
+mm_struct. But this approach leads to poor page fault scalability of
+multi-threaded applications due high contention on the lock. To improve
+scalability, split page table lock was introduced.
+
+With split page table lock we have separate per-table lock to serialize
+access to the table. At the moment we use split lock for PTE and PMD
+tables. Access to higher level tables protected by mm->page_table_lock.
+
+There are helpers to lock/unlock a table and other accessor functions:
+ - pte_offset_map_lock()
+ maps pte and takes PTE table lock, returns pointer to the taken
+ lock;
+ - pte_unmap_unlock()
+ unlocks and unmaps PTE table;
+ - pte_alloc_map_lock()
+ allocates PTE table if needed and take the lock, returns pointer
+ to taken lock or NULL if allocation failed;
+ - pte_lockptr()
+ returns pointer to PTE table lock;
+ - pmd_lock()
+ takes PMD table lock, returns pointer to taken lock;
+ - pmd_lockptr()
+ returns pointer to PMD table lock;
+
+Split page table lock for PTE tables is enabled compile-time if
+CONFIG_SPLIT_PTLOCK_CPUS (usually 4) is less or equal to NR_CPUS.
+If split lock is disabled, all tables guaded by mm->page_table_lock.
+
+Split page table lock for PMD tables is enabled, if it's enabled for PTE
+tables and the architecture supports it (see below).
+
+Hugetlb and split page table lock
+---------------------------------
+
+Hugetlb can support several page sizes. We use split lock only for PMD
+level, but not for PUD.
+
+Hugetlb-specific helpers:
+ - huge_pte_lock()
+ takes pmd split lock for PMD_SIZE page, mm->page_table_lock
+ otherwise;
+ - huge_pte_lockptr()
+ returns pointer to table lock;
+
+Support of split page table lock by an architecture
+---------------------------------------------------
+
+There's no need in special enabling of PTE split page table lock:
+everything required is done by pgtable_page_ctor() and pgtable_page_dtor(),
+which must be called on PTE table allocation / freeing.
+
+Make sure the architecture doesn't use slab allocator for page table
+allocation: slab uses page->slab_cache and page->first_page for its pages.
+These fields share storage with page->ptl.
+
+PMD split lock only makes sense if you have more than two page table
+levels.
+
+PMD split lock enabling requires pgtable_pmd_page_ctor() call on PMD table
+allocation and pgtable_pmd_page_dtor() on freeing.
+
+Allocation usually happens in pmd_alloc_one(), freeing in pmd_free() and
+pmd_free_tlb(), but make sure you cover all PMD table allocation / freeing
+paths: i.e X86_PAE preallocate few PMDs on pgd_alloc().
+
+With everything in place you can set CONFIG_ARCH_ENABLE_SPLIT_PMD_PTLOCK.
+
+NOTE: pgtable_page_ctor() and pgtable_pmd_page_ctor() can fail -- it must
+be handled properly.
+
+page->ptl
+---------
+
+page->ptl is used to access split page table lock, where 'page' is struct
+page of page containing the table. It shares storage with page->private
+(and few other fields in union).
+
+To avoid increasing size of struct page and have best performance, we use a
+trick:
+ - if spinlock_t fits into long, we use page->ptr as spinlock, so we
+ can avoid indirect access and save a cache line.
+ - if size of spinlock_t is bigger then size of long, we use page->ptl as
+ pointer to spinlock_t and allocate it dynamically. This allows to use
+ split lock with enabled DEBUG_SPINLOCK or DEBUG_LOCK_ALLOC, but costs
+ one more cache line for indirect access;
+
+The spinlock_t allocated in pgtable_page_ctor() for PTE table and in
+pgtable_pmd_page_ctor() for PMD table.
+
+Please, never access page->ptl directly -- use appropriate helper.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..8143b9e83
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,387 @@
+= Transparent Hugepage Support =
+
+== Objective ==
+
+Performance critical computing applications dealing with large memory
+working sets are already running on top of libhugetlbfs and in turn
+hugetlbfs. Transparent Hugepage Support is an alternative means of
+using huge pages for the backing of virtual memory with huge pages
+that supports the automatic promotion and demotion of page sizes and
+without the shortcomings of hugetlbfs.
+
+Currently it only works for anonymous memory mappings but in the
+future it can expand over the pagecache layer starting with tmpfs.
+
+The reason applications are running faster is because of two
+factors. The first factor is almost completely irrelevant and it's not
+of significant interest because it'll also have the downside of
+requiring larger clear-page copy-page in page faults which is a
+potentially negative effect. The first factor consists in taking a
+single page fault for each 2M virtual region touched by userland (so
+reducing the enter/exit kernel frequency by a 512 times factor). This
+only matters the first time the memory is accessed for the lifetime of
+a memory mapping. The second long lasting and much more important
+factor will affect all subsequent accesses to the memory for the whole
+runtime of the application. The second factor consist of two
+components: 1) the TLB miss will run faster (especially with
+virtualization using nested pagetables but almost always also on bare
+metal without virtualization) and 2) a single TLB entry will be
+mapping a much larger amount of virtual memory in turn reducing the
+number of TLB misses. With virtualization and nested pagetables the
+TLB can be mapped of larger size only if both KVM and the Linux guest
+are using hugepages but a significant speedup already happens if only
+one of the two is using hugepages just because of the fact the TLB
+miss is going to run faster.
+
+== Design ==
+
+- "graceful fallback": mm components which don't have transparent
+ hugepage knowledge fall back to breaking a transparent hugepage and
+ working on the regular pages and their respective regular pmd/pte
+ mappings
+
+- if a hugepage allocation fails because of memory fragmentation,
+ regular pages should be gracefully allocated instead and mixed in
+ the same vma without any failure or significant delay and without
+ userland noticing
+
+- if some task quits and more hugepages become available (either
+ immediately in the buddy or through the VM), guest physical memory
+ backed by regular pages should be relocated on hugepages
+ automatically (with khugepaged)
+
+- it doesn't require memory reservation and in turn it uses hugepages
+ whenever possible (the only possible reservation here is kernelcore=
+ to avoid unmovable pages to fragment all the memory but such a tweak
+ is not specific to transparent hugepage support and it's a generic
+ feature that applies to all dynamic high order allocations in the
+ kernel)
+
+- this initial support only offers the feature in the anonymous memory
+ regions but it'd be ideal to move it to tmpfs and the pagecache
+ later
+
+Transparent Hugepage Support maximizes the usefulness of free memory
+if compared to the reservation approach of hugetlbfs by allowing all
+unused memory to be used as cache or other movable (or even unmovable
+entities). It doesn't require reservation to prevent hugepage
+allocation failures to be noticeable from userland. It allows paging
+and all other advanced VM features to be available on the
+hugepages. It requires no modifications for applications to take
+advantage of it.
+
+Applications however can be further optimized to take advantage of
+this feature, like for example they've been optimized before to avoid
+a flood of mmap system calls for every malloc(4k). Optimizing userland
+is by far not mandatory and khugepaged already can take care of long
+lived page allocations even for hugepage unaware applications that
+deals with large amounts of memory.
+
+In certain cases when hugepages are enabled system wide, application
+may end up allocating more memory resources. An application may mmap a
+large region but only touch 1 byte of it, in that case a 2M page might
+be allocated instead of a 4k page for no good. This is why it's
+possible to disable hugepages system-wide and to only have them inside
+MADV_HUGEPAGE madvise regions.
+
+Embedded systems should enable hugepages only inside madvise regions
+to eliminate any risk of wasting any precious byte of memory and to
+only run faster.
+
+Applications that gets a lot of benefit from hugepages and that don't
+risk to lose memory by using hugepages, should use
+madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) on their critical mmapped regions.
+
+== sysfs ==
+
+Transparent Hugepage Support can be entirely disabled (mostly for
+debugging purposes) or only enabled inside MADV_HUGEPAGE regions (to
+avoid the risk of consuming more memory resources) or enabled system
+wide. This can be achieved with one of:
+
+echo always >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
+echo madvise >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
+echo never >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
+
+It's also possible to limit defrag efforts in the VM to generate
+hugepages in case they're not immediately free to madvise regions or
+to never try to defrag memory and simply fallback to regular pages
+unless hugepages are immediately available. Clearly if we spend CPU
+time to defrag memory, we would expect to gain even more by the fact
+we use hugepages later instead of regular pages. This isn't always
+guaranteed, but it may be more likely in case the allocation is for a
+MADV_HUGEPAGE region.
+
+echo always >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag
+echo madvise >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag
+echo never >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag
+
+By default kernel tries to use huge zero page on read page fault.
+It's possible to disable huge zero page by writing 0 or enable it
+back by writing 1:
+
+echo 0 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/use_zero_page
+echo 1 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/use_zero_page
+
+khugepaged will be automatically started when
+transparent_hugepage/enabled is set to "always" or "madvise, and it'll
+be automatically shutdown if it's set to "never".
+
+khugepaged runs usually at low frequency so while one may not want to
+invoke defrag algorithms synchronously during the page faults, it
+should be worth invoking defrag at least in khugepaged. However it's
+also possible to disable defrag in khugepaged by writing 0 or enable
+defrag in khugepaged by writing 1:
+
+echo 0 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag
+echo 1 >/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/defrag
+
+You can also control how many pages khugepaged should scan at each
+pass:
+
+/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_to_scan
+
+and how many milliseconds to wait in khugepaged between each pass (you
+can set this to 0 to run khugepaged at 100% utilization of one core):
+
+/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/scan_sleep_millisecs
+
+and how many milliseconds to wait in khugepaged if there's an hugepage
+allocation failure to throttle the next allocation attempt.
+
+/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/alloc_sleep_millisecs
+
+The khugepaged progress can be seen in the number of pages collapsed:
+
+/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/pages_collapsed
+
+for each pass:
+
+/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/full_scans
+
+max_ptes_none specifies how many extra small pages (that are
+not already mapped) can be allocated when collapsing a group
+of small pages into one large page.
+
+/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/khugepaged/max_ptes_none
+
+A higher value leads to use additional memory for programs.
+A lower value leads to gain less thp performance. Value of
+max_ptes_none can waste cpu time very little, you can
+ignore it.
+
+== Boot parameter ==
+
+You can change the sysfs boot time defaults of Transparent Hugepage
+Support by passing the parameter "transparent_hugepage=always" or
+"transparent_hugepage=madvise" or "transparent_hugepage=never"
+(without "") to the kernel command line.
+
+== Need of application restart ==
+
+The transparent_hugepage/enabled values only affect future
+behavior. So to make them effective you need to restart any
+application that could have been using hugepages. This also applies to
+the regions registered in khugepaged.
+
+== Monitoring usage ==
+
+The number of transparent huge pages currently used by the system is
+available by reading the AnonHugePages field in /proc/meminfo. To
+identify what applications are using transparent huge pages, it is
+necessary to read /proc/PID/smaps and count the AnonHugePages fields
+for each mapping. Note that reading the smaps file is expensive and
+reading it frequently will incur overhead.
+
+There are a number of counters in /proc/vmstat that may be used to
+monitor how successfully the system is providing huge pages for use.
+
+thp_fault_alloc is incremented every time a huge page is successfully
+ allocated to handle a page fault. This applies to both the
+ first time a page is faulted and for COW faults.
+
+thp_collapse_alloc is incremented by khugepaged when it has found
+ a range of pages to collapse into one huge page and has
+ successfully allocated a new huge page to store the data.
+
+thp_fault_fallback is incremented if a page fault fails to allocate
+ a huge page and instead falls back to using small pages.
+
+thp_collapse_alloc_failed is incremented if khugepaged found a range
+ of pages that should be collapsed into one huge page but failed
+ the allocation.
+
+thp_split is incremented every time a huge page is split into base
+ pages. This can happen for a variety of reasons but a common
+ reason is that a huge page is old and is being reclaimed.
+
+thp_zero_page_alloc is incremented every time a huge zero page is
+ successfully allocated. It includes allocations which where
+ dropped due race with other allocation. Note, it doesn't count
+ every map of the huge zero page, only its allocation.
+
+thp_zero_page_alloc_failed is incremented if kernel fails to allocate
+ huge zero page and falls back to using small pages.
+
+As the system ages, allocating huge pages may be expensive as the
+system uses memory compaction to copy data around memory to free a
+huge page for use. There are some counters in /proc/vmstat to help
+monitor this overhead.
+
+compact_stall is incremented every time a process stalls to run
+ memory compaction so that a huge page is free for use.
+
+compact_success is incremented if the system compacted memory and
+ freed a huge page for use.
+
+compact_fail is incremented if the system tries to compact memory
+ but failed.
+
+compact_pages_moved is incremented each time a page is moved. If
+ this value is increasing rapidly, it implies that the system
+ is copying a lot of data to satisfy the huge page allocation.
+ It is possible that the cost of copying exceeds any savings
+ from reduced TLB misses.
+
+compact_pagemigrate_failed is incremented when the underlying mechanism
+ for moving a page failed.
+
+compact_blocks_moved is incremented each time memory compaction examines
+ a huge page aligned range of pages.
+
+It is possible to establish how long the stalls were using the function
+tracer to record how long was spent in __alloc_pages_nodemask and
+using the mm_page_alloc tracepoint to identify which allocations were
+for huge pages.
+
+== get_user_pages and follow_page ==
+
+get_user_pages and follow_page if run on a hugepage, will return the
+head or tail pages as usual (exactly as they would do on
+hugetlbfs). Most gup users will only care about the actual physical
+address of the page and its temporary pinning to release after the I/O
+is complete, so they won't ever notice the fact the page is huge. But
+if any driver is going to mangle over the page structure of the tail
+page (like for checking page->mapping or other bits that are relevant
+for the head page and not the tail page), it should be updated to jump
+to check head page instead (while serializing properly against
+split_huge_page() to avoid the head and tail pages to disappear from
+under it, see the futex code to see an example of that, hugetlbfs also
+needed special handling in futex code for similar reasons).
+
+NOTE: these aren't new constraints to the GUP API, and they match the
+same constrains that applies to hugetlbfs too, so any driver capable
+of handling GUP on hugetlbfs will also work fine on transparent
+hugepage backed mappings.
+
+In case you can't handle compound pages if they're returned by
+follow_page, the FOLL_SPLIT bit can be specified as parameter to
+follow_page, so that it will split the hugepages before returning
+them. Migration for example passes FOLL_SPLIT as parameter to
+follow_page because it's not hugepage aware and in fact it can't work
+at all on hugetlbfs (but it instead works fine on transparent
+hugepages thanks to FOLL_SPLIT). migration simply can't deal with
+hugepages being returned (as it's not only checking the pfn of the
+page and pinning it during the copy but it pretends to migrate the
+memory in regular page sizes and with regular pte/pmd mappings).
+
+== Optimizing the applications ==
+
+To be guaranteed that the kernel will map a 2M page immediately in any
+memory region, the mmap region has to be hugepage naturally
+aligned. posix_memalign() can provide that guarantee.
+
+== Hugetlbfs ==
+
+You can use hugetlbfs on a kernel that has transparent hugepage
+support enabled just fine as always. No difference can be noted in
+hugetlbfs other than there will be less overall fragmentation. All
+usual features belonging to hugetlbfs are preserved and
+unaffected. libhugetlbfs will also work fine as usual.
+
+== Graceful fallback ==
+
+Code walking pagetables but unware about huge pmds can simply call
+split_huge_page_pmd(vma, addr, pmd) where the pmd is the one returned by
+pmd_offset. It's trivial to make the code transparent hugepage aware
+by just grepping for "pmd_offset" and adding split_huge_page_pmd where
+missing after pmd_offset returns the pmd. Thanks to the graceful
+fallback design, with a one liner change, you can avoid to write
+hundred if not thousand of lines of complex code to make your code
+hugepage aware.
+
+If you're not walking pagetables but you run into a physical hugepage
+but you can't handle it natively in your code, you can split it by
+calling split_huge_page(page). This is what the Linux VM does before
+it tries to swapout the hugepage for example.
+
+Example to make mremap.c transparent hugepage aware with a one liner
+change:
+
+diff --git a/mm/mremap.c b/mm/mremap.c
+--- a/mm/mremap.c
++++ b/mm/mremap.c
+@@ -41,6 +41,7 @@ static pmd_t *get_old_pmd(struct mm_stru
+ return NULL;
+
+ pmd = pmd_offset(pud, addr);
++ split_huge_page_pmd(vma, addr, pmd);
+ if (pmd_none_or_clear_bad(pmd))
+ return NULL;
+
+== Locking in hugepage aware code ==
+
+We want as much code as possible hugepage aware, as calling
+split_huge_page() or split_huge_page_pmd() has a cost.
+
+To make pagetable walks huge pmd aware, all you need to do is to call
+pmd_trans_huge() on the pmd returned by pmd_offset. You must hold the
+mmap_sem in read (or write) mode to be sure an huge pmd cannot be
+created from under you by khugepaged (khugepaged collapse_huge_page
+takes the mmap_sem in write mode in addition to the anon_vma lock). If
+pmd_trans_huge returns false, you just fallback in the old code
+paths. If instead pmd_trans_huge returns true, you have to take the
+mm->page_table_lock and re-run pmd_trans_huge. Taking the
+page_table_lock will prevent the huge pmd to be converted into a
+regular pmd from under you (split_huge_page can run in parallel to the
+pagetable walk). If the second pmd_trans_huge returns false, you
+should just drop the page_table_lock and fallback to the old code as
+before. Otherwise you should run pmd_trans_splitting on the pmd. In
+case pmd_trans_splitting returns true, it means split_huge_page is
+already in the middle of splitting the page. So if pmd_trans_splitting
+returns true it's enough to drop the page_table_lock and call
+wait_split_huge_page and then fallback the old code paths. You are
+guaranteed by the time wait_split_huge_page returns, the pmd isn't
+huge anymore. If pmd_trans_splitting returns false, you can proceed to
+process the huge pmd and the hugepage natively. Once finished you can
+drop the page_table_lock.
+
+== compound_lock, get_user_pages and put_page ==
+
+split_huge_page internally has to distribute the refcounts in the head
+page to the tail pages before clearing all PG_head/tail bits from the
+page structures. It can do that easily for refcounts taken by huge pmd
+mappings. But the GUI API as created by hugetlbfs (that returns head
+and tail pages if running get_user_pages on an address backed by any
+hugepage), requires the refcount to be accounted on the tail pages and
+not only in the head pages, if we want to be able to run
+split_huge_page while there are gup pins established on any tail
+page. Failure to be able to run split_huge_page if there's any gup pin
+on any tail page, would mean having to split all hugepages upfront in
+get_user_pages which is unacceptable as too many gup users are
+performance critical and they must work natively on hugepages like
+they work natively on hugetlbfs already (hugetlbfs is simpler because
+hugetlbfs pages cannot be split so there wouldn't be requirement of
+accounting the pins on the tail pages for hugetlbfs). If we wouldn't
+account the gup refcounts on the tail pages during gup, we won't know
+anymore which tail page is pinned by gup and which is not while we run
+split_huge_page. But we still have to add the gup pin to the head page
+too, to know when we can free the compound page in case it's never
+split during its lifetime. That requires changing not just
+get_page, but put_page as well so that when put_page runs on a tail
+page (and only on a tail page) it will find its respective head page,
+and then it will decrease the head page refcount in addition to the
+tail page refcount. To obtain a head page reliably and to decrease its
+refcount without race conditions, put_page has to serialize against
+__split_huge_page_refcount using a special per-page lock called
+compound_lock.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/unevictable-lru.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/unevictable-lru.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..3be0bfc47
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/unevictable-lru.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,688 @@
+ ==============================
+ UNEVICTABLE LRU INFRASTRUCTURE
+ ==============================
+
+========
+CONTENTS
+========
+
+ (*) The Unevictable LRU
+
+ - The unevictable page list.
+ - Memory control group interaction.
+ - Marking address spaces unevictable.
+ - Detecting Unevictable Pages.
+ - vmscan's handling of unevictable pages.
+
+ (*) mlock()'d pages.
+
+ - History.
+ - Basic management.
+ - mlock()/mlockall() system call handling.
+ - Filtering special vmas.
+ - munlock()/munlockall() system call handling.
+ - Migrating mlocked pages.
+ - Compacting mlocked pages.
+ - mmap(MAP_LOCKED) system call handling.
+ - munmap()/exit()/exec() system call handling.
+ - try_to_unmap().
+ - try_to_munlock() reverse map scan.
+ - Page reclaim in shrink_*_list().
+
+
+============
+INTRODUCTION
+============
+
+This document describes the Linux memory manager's "Unevictable LRU"
+infrastructure and the use of this to manage several types of "unevictable"
+pages.
+
+The document attempts to provide the overall rationale behind this mechanism
+and the rationale for some of the design decisions that drove the
+implementation. The latter design rationale is discussed in the context of an
+implementation description. Admittedly, one can obtain the implementation
+details - the "what does it do?" - by reading the code. One hopes that the
+descriptions below add value by provide the answer to "why does it do that?".
+
+
+===================
+THE UNEVICTABLE LRU
+===================
+
+The Unevictable LRU facility adds an additional LRU list to track unevictable
+pages and to hide these pages from vmscan. This mechanism is based on a patch
+by Larry Woodman of Red Hat to address several scalability problems with page
+reclaim in Linux. The problems have been observed at customer sites on large
+memory x86_64 systems.
+
+To illustrate this with an example, a non-NUMA x86_64 platform with 128GB of
+main memory will have over 32 million 4k pages in a single zone. When a large
+fraction of these pages are not evictable for any reason [see below], vmscan
+will spend a lot of time scanning the LRU lists looking for the small fraction
+of pages that are evictable. This can result in a situation where all CPUs are
+spending 100% of their time in vmscan for hours or days on end, with the system
+completely unresponsive.
+
+The unevictable list addresses the following classes of unevictable pages:
+
+ (*) Those owned by ramfs.
+
+ (*) Those mapped into SHM_LOCK'd shared memory regions.
+
+ (*) Those mapped into VM_LOCKED [mlock()ed] VMAs.
+
+The infrastructure may also be able to handle other conditions that make pages
+unevictable, either by definition or by circumstance, in the future.
+
+
+THE UNEVICTABLE PAGE LIST
+-------------------------
+
+The Unevictable LRU infrastructure consists of an additional, per-zone, LRU list
+called the "unevictable" list and an associated page flag, PG_unevictable, to
+indicate that the page is being managed on the unevictable list.
+
+The PG_unevictable flag is analogous to, and mutually exclusive with, the
+PG_active flag in that it indicates on which LRU list a page resides when
+PG_lru is set.
+
+The Unevictable LRU infrastructure maintains unevictable pages on an additional
+LRU list for a few reasons:
+
+ (1) We get to "treat unevictable pages just like we treat other pages in the
+ system - which means we get to use the same code to manipulate them, the
+ same code to isolate them (for migrate, etc.), the same code to keep track
+ of the statistics, etc..." [Rik van Riel]
+
+ (2) We want to be able to migrate unevictable pages between nodes for memory
+ defragmentation, workload management and memory hotplug. The linux kernel
+ can only migrate pages that it can successfully isolate from the LRU
+ lists. If we were to maintain pages elsewhere than on an LRU-like list,
+ where they can be found by isolate_lru_page(), we would prevent their
+ migration, unless we reworked migration code to find the unevictable pages
+ itself.
+
+
+The unevictable list does not differentiate between file-backed and anonymous,
+swap-backed pages. This differentiation is only important while the pages are,
+in fact, evictable.
+
+The unevictable list benefits from the "arrayification" of the per-zone LRU
+lists and statistics originally proposed and posted by Christoph Lameter.
+
+The unevictable list does not use the LRU pagevec mechanism. Rather,
+unevictable pages are placed directly on the page's zone's unevictable list
+under the zone lru_lock. This allows us to prevent the stranding of pages on
+the unevictable list when one task has the page isolated from the LRU and other
+tasks are changing the "evictability" state of the page.
+
+
+MEMORY CONTROL GROUP INTERACTION
+--------------------------------
+
+The unevictable LRU facility interacts with the memory control group [aka
+memory controller; see Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt] by extending the
+lru_list enum.
+
+The memory controller data structure automatically gets a per-zone unevictable
+list as a result of the "arrayification" of the per-zone LRU lists (one per
+lru_list enum element). The memory controller tracks the movement of pages to
+and from the unevictable list.
+
+When a memory control group comes under memory pressure, the controller will
+not attempt to reclaim pages on the unevictable list. This has a couple of
+effects:
+
+ (1) Because the pages are "hidden" from reclaim on the unevictable list, the
+ reclaim process can be more efficient, dealing only with pages that have a
+ chance of being reclaimed.
+
+ (2) On the other hand, if too many of the pages charged to the control group
+ are unevictable, the evictable portion of the working set of the tasks in
+ the control group may not fit into the available memory. This can cause
+ the control group to thrash or to OOM-kill tasks.
+
+
+MARKING ADDRESS SPACES UNEVICTABLE
+----------------------------------
+
+For facilities such as ramfs none of the pages attached to the address space
+may be evicted. To prevent eviction of any such pages, the AS_UNEVICTABLE
+address space flag is provided, and this can be manipulated by a filesystem
+using a number of wrapper functions:
+
+ (*) void mapping_set_unevictable(struct address_space *mapping);
+
+ Mark the address space as being completely unevictable.
+
+ (*) void mapping_clear_unevictable(struct address_space *mapping);
+
+ Mark the address space as being evictable.
+
+ (*) int mapping_unevictable(struct address_space *mapping);
+
+ Query the address space, and return true if it is completely
+ unevictable.
+
+These are currently used in two places in the kernel:
+
+ (1) By ramfs to mark the address spaces of its inodes when they are created,
+ and this mark remains for the life of the inode.
+
+ (2) By SYSV SHM to mark SHM_LOCK'd address spaces until SHM_UNLOCK is called.
+
+ Note that SHM_LOCK is not required to page in the locked pages if they're
+ swapped out; the application must touch the pages manually if it wants to
+ ensure they're in memory.
+
+
+DETECTING UNEVICTABLE PAGES
+---------------------------
+
+The function page_evictable() in vmscan.c determines whether a page is
+evictable or not using the query function outlined above [see section "Marking
+address spaces unevictable"] to check the AS_UNEVICTABLE flag.
+
+For address spaces that are so marked after being populated (as SHM regions
+might be), the lock action (eg: SHM_LOCK) can be lazy, and need not populate
+the page tables for the region as does, for example, mlock(), nor need it make
+any special effort to push any pages in the SHM_LOCK'd area to the unevictable
+list. Instead, vmscan will do this if and when it encounters the pages during
+a reclamation scan.
+
+On an unlock action (such as SHM_UNLOCK), the unlocker (eg: shmctl()) must scan
+the pages in the region and "rescue" them from the unevictable list if no other
+condition is keeping them unevictable. If an unevictable region is destroyed,
+the pages are also "rescued" from the unevictable list in the process of
+freeing them.
+
+page_evictable() also checks for mlocked pages by testing an additional page
+flag, PG_mlocked (as wrapped by PageMlocked()), which is set when a page is
+faulted into a VM_LOCKED vma, or found in a vma being VM_LOCKED.
+
+
+VMSCAN'S HANDLING OF UNEVICTABLE PAGES
+--------------------------------------
+
+If unevictable pages are culled in the fault path, or moved to the unevictable
+list at mlock() or mmap() time, vmscan will not encounter the pages until they
+have become evictable again (via munlock() for example) and have been "rescued"
+from the unevictable list. However, there may be situations where we decide,
+for the sake of expediency, to leave a unevictable page on one of the regular
+active/inactive LRU lists for vmscan to deal with. vmscan checks for such
+pages in all of the shrink_{active|inactive|page}_list() functions and will
+"cull" such pages that it encounters: that is, it diverts those pages to the
+unevictable list for the zone being scanned.
+
+There may be situations where a page is mapped into a VM_LOCKED VMA, but the
+page is not marked as PG_mlocked. Such pages will make it all the way to
+shrink_page_list() where they will be detected when vmscan walks the reverse
+map in try_to_unmap(). If try_to_unmap() returns SWAP_MLOCK,
+shrink_page_list() will cull the page at that point.
+
+To "cull" an unevictable page, vmscan simply puts the page back on the LRU list
+using putback_lru_page() - the inverse operation to isolate_lru_page() - after
+dropping the page lock. Because the condition which makes the page unevictable
+may change once the page is unlocked, putback_lru_page() will recheck the
+unevictable state of a page that it places on the unevictable list. If the
+page has become unevictable, putback_lru_page() removes it from the list and
+retries, including the page_unevictable() test. Because such a race is a rare
+event and movement of pages onto the unevictable list should be rare, these
+extra evictabilty checks should not occur in the majority of calls to
+putback_lru_page().
+
+
+=============
+MLOCKED PAGES
+=============
+
+The unevictable page list is also useful for mlock(), in addition to ramfs and
+SYSV SHM. Note that mlock() is only available in CONFIG_MMU=y situations; in
+NOMMU situations, all mappings are effectively mlocked.
+
+
+HISTORY
+-------
+
+The "Unevictable mlocked Pages" infrastructure is based on work originally
+posted by Nick Piggin in an RFC patch entitled "mm: mlocked pages off LRU".
+Nick posted his patch as an alternative to a patch posted by Christoph Lameter
+to achieve the same objective: hiding mlocked pages from vmscan.
+
+In Nick's patch, he used one of the struct page LRU list link fields as a count
+of VM_LOCKED VMAs that map the page. This use of the link field for a count
+prevented the management of the pages on an LRU list, and thus mlocked pages
+were not migratable as isolate_lru_page() could not find them, and the LRU list
+link field was not available to the migration subsystem.
+
+Nick resolved this by putting mlocked pages back on the lru list before
+attempting to isolate them, thus abandoning the count of VM_LOCKED VMAs. When
+Nick's patch was integrated with the Unevictable LRU work, the count was
+replaced by walking the reverse map to determine whether any VM_LOCKED VMAs
+mapped the page. More on this below.
+
+
+BASIC MANAGEMENT
+----------------
+
+mlocked pages - pages mapped into a VM_LOCKED VMA - are a class of unevictable
+pages. When such a page has been "noticed" by the memory management subsystem,
+the page is marked with the PG_mlocked flag. This can be manipulated using the
+PageMlocked() functions.
+
+A PG_mlocked page will be placed on the unevictable list when it is added to
+the LRU. Such pages can be "noticed" by memory management in several places:
+
+ (1) in the mlock()/mlockall() system call handlers;
+
+ (2) in the mmap() system call handler when mmapping a region with the
+ MAP_LOCKED flag;
+
+ (3) mmapping a region in a task that has called mlockall() with the MCL_FUTURE
+ flag
+
+ (4) in the fault path, if mlocked pages are "culled" in the fault path,
+ and when a VM_LOCKED stack segment is expanded; or
+
+ (5) as mentioned above, in vmscan:shrink_page_list() when attempting to
+ reclaim a page in a VM_LOCKED VMA via try_to_unmap()
+
+all of which result in the VM_LOCKED flag being set for the VMA if it doesn't
+already have it set.
+
+mlocked pages become unlocked and rescued from the unevictable list when:
+
+ (1) mapped in a range unlocked via the munlock()/munlockall() system calls;
+
+ (2) munmap()'d out of the last VM_LOCKED VMA that maps the page, including
+ unmapping at task exit;
+
+ (3) when the page is truncated from the last VM_LOCKED VMA of an mmapped file;
+ or
+
+ (4) before a page is COW'd in a VM_LOCKED VMA.
+
+
+mlock()/mlockall() SYSTEM CALL HANDLING
+---------------------------------------
+
+Both [do_]mlock() and [do_]mlockall() system call handlers call mlock_fixup()
+for each VMA in the range specified by the call. In the case of mlockall(),
+this is the entire active address space of the task. Note that mlock_fixup()
+is used for both mlocking and munlocking a range of memory. A call to mlock()
+an already VM_LOCKED VMA, or to munlock() a VMA that is not VM_LOCKED is
+treated as a no-op, and mlock_fixup() simply returns.
+
+If the VMA passes some filtering as described in "Filtering Special Vmas"
+below, mlock_fixup() will attempt to merge the VMA with its neighbors or split
+off a subset of the VMA if the range does not cover the entire VMA. Once the
+VMA has been merged or split or neither, mlock_fixup() will call
+populate_vma_page_range() to fault in the pages via get_user_pages() and to
+mark the pages as mlocked via mlock_vma_page().
+
+Note that the VMA being mlocked might be mapped with PROT_NONE. In this case,
+get_user_pages() will be unable to fault in the pages. That's okay. If pages
+do end up getting faulted into this VM_LOCKED VMA, we'll handle them in the
+fault path or in vmscan.
+
+Also note that a page returned by get_user_pages() could be truncated or
+migrated out from under us, while we're trying to mlock it. To detect this,
+populate_vma_page_range() checks page_mapping() after acquiring the page lock.
+If the page is still associated with its mapping, we'll go ahead and call
+mlock_vma_page(). If the mapping is gone, we just unlock the page and move on.
+In the worst case, this will result in a page mapped in a VM_LOCKED VMA
+remaining on a normal LRU list without being PageMlocked(). Again, vmscan will
+detect and cull such pages.
+
+mlock_vma_page() will call TestSetPageMlocked() for each page returned by
+get_user_pages(). We use TestSetPageMlocked() because the page might already
+be mlocked by another task/VMA and we don't want to do extra work. We
+especially do not want to count an mlocked page more than once in the
+statistics. If the page was already mlocked, mlock_vma_page() need do nothing
+more.
+
+If the page was NOT already mlocked, mlock_vma_page() attempts to isolate the
+page from the LRU, as it is likely on the appropriate active or inactive list
+at that time. If the isolate_lru_page() succeeds, mlock_vma_page() will put
+back the page - by calling putback_lru_page() - which will notice that the page
+is now mlocked and divert the page to the zone's unevictable list. If
+mlock_vma_page() is unable to isolate the page from the LRU, vmscan will handle
+it later if and when it attempts to reclaim the page.
+
+
+FILTERING SPECIAL VMAS
+----------------------
+
+mlock_fixup() filters several classes of "special" VMAs:
+
+1) VMAs with VM_IO or VM_PFNMAP set are skipped entirely. The pages behind
+ these mappings are inherently pinned, so we don't need to mark them as
+ mlocked. In any case, most of the pages have no struct page in which to so
+ mark the page. Because of this, get_user_pages() will fail for these VMAs,
+ so there is no sense in attempting to visit them.
+
+2) VMAs mapping hugetlbfs page are already effectively pinned into memory. We
+ neither need nor want to mlock() these pages. However, to preserve the
+ prior behavior of mlock() - before the unevictable/mlock changes -
+ mlock_fixup() will call make_pages_present() in the hugetlbfs VMA range to
+ allocate the huge pages and populate the ptes.
+
+3) VMAs with VM_DONTEXPAND are generally userspace mappings of kernel pages,
+ such as the VDSO page, relay channel pages, etc. These pages
+ are inherently unevictable and are not managed on the LRU lists.
+ mlock_fixup() treats these VMAs the same as hugetlbfs VMAs. It calls
+ make_pages_present() to populate the ptes.
+
+Note that for all of these special VMAs, mlock_fixup() does not set the
+VM_LOCKED flag. Therefore, we won't have to deal with them later during
+munlock(), munmap() or task exit. Neither does mlock_fixup() account these
+VMAs against the task's "locked_vm".
+
+
+munlock()/munlockall() SYSTEM CALL HANDLING
+-------------------------------------------
+
+The munlock() and munlockall() system calls are handled by the same functions -
+do_mlock[all]() - as the mlock() and mlockall() system calls with the unlock vs
+lock operation indicated by an argument. So, these system calls are also
+handled by mlock_fixup(). Again, if called for an already munlocked VMA,
+mlock_fixup() simply returns. Because of the VMA filtering discussed above,
+VM_LOCKED will not be set in any "special" VMAs. So, these VMAs will be
+ignored for munlock.
+
+If the VMA is VM_LOCKED, mlock_fixup() again attempts to merge or split off the
+specified range. The range is then munlocked via the function
+populate_vma_page_range() - the same function used to mlock a VMA range -
+passing a flag to indicate that munlock() is being performed.
+
+Because the VMA access protections could have been changed to PROT_NONE after
+faulting in and mlocking pages, get_user_pages() was unreliable for visiting
+these pages for munlocking. Because we don't want to leave pages mlocked,
+get_user_pages() was enhanced to accept a flag to ignore the permissions when
+fetching the pages - all of which should be resident as a result of previous
+mlocking.
+
+For munlock(), populate_vma_page_range() unlocks individual pages by calling
+munlock_vma_page(). munlock_vma_page() unconditionally clears the PG_mlocked
+flag using TestClearPageMlocked(). As with mlock_vma_page(),
+munlock_vma_page() use the Test*PageMlocked() function to handle the case where
+the page might have already been unlocked by another task. If the page was
+mlocked, munlock_vma_page() updates that zone statistics for the number of
+mlocked pages. Note, however, that at this point we haven't checked whether
+the page is mapped by other VM_LOCKED VMAs.
+
+We can't call try_to_munlock(), the function that walks the reverse map to
+check for other VM_LOCKED VMAs, without first isolating the page from the LRU.
+try_to_munlock() is a variant of try_to_unmap() and thus requires that the page
+not be on an LRU list [more on these below]. However, the call to
+isolate_lru_page() could fail, in which case we couldn't try_to_munlock(). So,
+we go ahead and clear PG_mlocked up front, as this might be the only chance we
+have. If we can successfully isolate the page, we go ahead and
+try_to_munlock(), which will restore the PG_mlocked flag and update the zone
+page statistics if it finds another VMA holding the page mlocked. If we fail
+to isolate the page, we'll have left a potentially mlocked page on the LRU.
+This is fine, because we'll catch it later if and if vmscan tries to reclaim
+the page. This should be relatively rare.
+
+
+MIGRATING MLOCKED PAGES
+-----------------------
+
+A page that is being migrated has been isolated from the LRU lists and is held
+locked across unmapping of the page, updating the page's address space entry
+and copying the contents and state, until the page table entry has been
+replaced with an entry that refers to the new page. Linux supports migration
+of mlocked pages and other unevictable pages. This involves simply moving the
+PG_mlocked and PG_unevictable states from the old page to the new page.
+
+Note that page migration can race with mlocking or munlocking of the same page.
+This has been discussed from the mlock/munlock perspective in the respective
+sections above. Both processes (migration and m[un]locking) hold the page
+locked. This provides the first level of synchronization. Page migration
+zeros out the page_mapping of the old page before unlocking it, so m[un]lock
+can skip these pages by testing the page mapping under page lock.
+
+To complete page migration, we place the new and old pages back onto the LRU
+after dropping the page lock. The "unneeded" page - old page on success, new
+page on failure - will be freed when the reference count held by the migration
+process is released. To ensure that we don't strand pages on the unevictable
+list because of a race between munlock and migration, page migration uses the
+putback_lru_page() function to add migrated pages back to the LRU.
+
+
+COMPACTING MLOCKED PAGES
+------------------------
+
+The unevictable LRU can be scanned for compactable regions and the default
+behavior is to do so. /proc/sys/vm/compact_unevictable_allowed controls
+this behavior (see Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt). Once scanning of the
+unevictable LRU is enabled, the work of compaction is mostly handled by
+the page migration code and the same work flow as described in MIGRATING
+MLOCKED PAGES will apply.
+
+
+mmap(MAP_LOCKED) SYSTEM CALL HANDLING
+-------------------------------------
+
+In addition the mlock()/mlockall() system calls, an application can request
+that a region of memory be mlocked supplying the MAP_LOCKED flag to the mmap()
+call. Furthermore, any mmap() call or brk() call that expands the heap by a
+task that has previously called mlockall() with the MCL_FUTURE flag will result
+in the newly mapped memory being mlocked. Before the unevictable/mlock
+changes, the kernel simply called make_pages_present() to allocate pages and
+populate the page table.
+
+To mlock a range of memory under the unevictable/mlock infrastructure, the
+mmap() handler and task address space expansion functions call
+populate_vma_page_range() specifying the vma and the address range to mlock.
+
+The callers of populate_vma_page_range() will have already added the memory range
+to be mlocked to the task's "locked_vm". To account for filtered VMAs,
+populate_vma_page_range() returns the number of pages NOT mlocked. All of the
+callers then subtract a non-negative return value from the task's locked_vm. A
+negative return value represent an error - for example, from get_user_pages()
+attempting to fault in a VMA with PROT_NONE access. In this case, we leave the
+memory range accounted as locked_vm, as the protections could be changed later
+and pages allocated into that region.
+
+
+munmap()/exit()/exec() SYSTEM CALL HANDLING
+-------------------------------------------
+
+When unmapping an mlocked region of memory, whether by an explicit call to
+munmap() or via an internal unmap from exit() or exec() processing, we must
+munlock the pages if we're removing the last VM_LOCKED VMA that maps the pages.
+Before the unevictable/mlock changes, mlocking did not mark the pages in any
+way, so unmapping them required no processing.
+
+To munlock a range of memory under the unevictable/mlock infrastructure, the
+munmap() handler and task address space call tear down function
+munlock_vma_pages_all(). The name reflects the observation that one always
+specifies the entire VMA range when munlock()ing during unmap of a region.
+Because of the VMA filtering when mlocking() regions, only "normal" VMAs that
+actually contain mlocked pages will be passed to munlock_vma_pages_all().
+
+munlock_vma_pages_all() clears the VM_LOCKED VMA flag and, like mlock_fixup()
+for the munlock case, calls __munlock_vma_pages_range() to walk the page table
+for the VMA's memory range and munlock_vma_page() each resident page mapped by
+the VMA. This effectively munlocks the page, only if this is the last
+VM_LOCKED VMA that maps the page.
+
+
+try_to_unmap()
+--------------
+
+Pages can, of course, be mapped into multiple VMAs. Some of these VMAs may
+have VM_LOCKED flag set. It is possible for a page mapped into one or more
+VM_LOCKED VMAs not to have the PG_mlocked flag set and therefore reside on one
+of the active or inactive LRU lists. This could happen if, for example, a task
+in the process of munlocking the page could not isolate the page from the LRU.
+As a result, vmscan/shrink_page_list() might encounter such a page as described
+in section "vmscan's handling of unevictable pages". To handle this situation,
+try_to_unmap() checks for VM_LOCKED VMAs while it is walking a page's reverse
+map.
+
+try_to_unmap() is always called, by either vmscan for reclaim or for page
+migration, with the argument page locked and isolated from the LRU. Separate
+functions handle anonymous and mapped file pages, as these types of pages have
+different reverse map mechanisms.
+
+ (*) try_to_unmap_anon()
+
+ To unmap anonymous pages, each VMA in the list anchored in the anon_vma
+ must be visited - at least until a VM_LOCKED VMA is encountered. If the
+ page is being unmapped for migration, VM_LOCKED VMAs do not stop the
+ process because mlocked pages are migratable. However, for reclaim, if
+ the page is mapped into a VM_LOCKED VMA, the scan stops.
+
+ try_to_unmap_anon() attempts to acquire in read mode the mmap semaphore of
+ the mm_struct to which the VMA belongs. If this is successful, it will
+ mlock the page via mlock_vma_page() - we wouldn't have gotten to
+ try_to_unmap_anon() if the page were already mlocked - and will return
+ SWAP_MLOCK, indicating that the page is unevictable.
+
+ If the mmap semaphore cannot be acquired, we are not sure whether the page
+ is really unevictable or not. In this case, try_to_unmap_anon() will
+ return SWAP_AGAIN.
+
+ (*) try_to_unmap_file() - linear mappings
+
+ Unmapping of a mapped file page works the same as for anonymous mappings,
+ except that the scan visits all VMAs that map the page's index/page offset
+ in the page's mapping's reverse map priority search tree. It also visits
+ each VMA in the page's mapping's non-linear list, if the list is
+ non-empty.
+
+ As for anonymous pages, on encountering a VM_LOCKED VMA for a mapped file
+ page, try_to_unmap_file() will attempt to acquire the associated
+ mm_struct's mmap semaphore to mlock the page, returning SWAP_MLOCK if this
+ is successful, and SWAP_AGAIN, if not.
+
+ (*) try_to_unmap_file() - non-linear mappings
+
+ If a page's mapping contains a non-empty non-linear mapping VMA list, then
+ try_to_un{map|lock}() must also visit each VMA in that list to determine
+ whether the page is mapped in a VM_LOCKED VMA. Again, the scan must visit
+ all VMAs in the non-linear list to ensure that the pages is not/should not
+ be mlocked.
+
+ If a VM_LOCKED VMA is found in the list, the scan could terminate.
+ However, there is no easy way to determine whether the page is actually
+ mapped in a given VMA - either for unmapping or testing whether the
+ VM_LOCKED VMA actually pins the page.
+
+ try_to_unmap_file() handles non-linear mappings by scanning a certain
+ number of pages - a "cluster" - in each non-linear VMA associated with the
+ page's mapping, for each file mapped page that vmscan tries to unmap. If
+ this happens to unmap the page we're trying to unmap, try_to_unmap() will
+ notice this on return (page_mapcount(page) will be 0) and return
+ SWAP_SUCCESS. Otherwise, it will return SWAP_AGAIN, causing vmscan to
+ recirculate this page. We take advantage of the cluster scan in
+ try_to_unmap_cluster() as follows:
+
+ For each non-linear VMA, try_to_unmap_cluster() attempts to acquire the
+ mmap semaphore of the associated mm_struct for read without blocking.
+
+ If this attempt is successful and the VMA is VM_LOCKED,
+ try_to_unmap_cluster() will retain the mmap semaphore for the scan;
+ otherwise it drops it here.
+
+ Then, for each page in the cluster, if we're holding the mmap semaphore
+ for a locked VMA, try_to_unmap_cluster() calls mlock_vma_page() to
+ mlock the page. This call is a no-op if the page is already locked,
+ but will mlock any pages in the non-linear mapping that happen to be
+ unlocked.
+
+ If one of the pages so mlocked is the page passed in to try_to_unmap(),
+ try_to_unmap_cluster() will return SWAP_MLOCK, rather than the default
+ SWAP_AGAIN. This will allow vmscan to cull the page, rather than
+ recirculating it on the inactive list.
+
+ Again, if try_to_unmap_cluster() cannot acquire the VMA's mmap sem, it
+ returns SWAP_AGAIN, indicating that the page is mapped by a VM_LOCKED
+ VMA, but couldn't be mlocked.
+
+
+try_to_munlock() REVERSE MAP SCAN
+---------------------------------
+
+ [!] TODO/FIXME: a better name might be page_mlocked() - analogous to the
+ page_referenced() reverse map walker.
+
+When munlock_vma_page() [see section "munlock()/munlockall() System Call
+Handling" above] tries to munlock a page, it needs to determine whether or not
+the page is mapped by any VM_LOCKED VMA without actually attempting to unmap
+all PTEs from the page. For this purpose, the unevictable/mlock infrastructure
+introduced a variant of try_to_unmap() called try_to_munlock().
+
+try_to_munlock() calls the same functions as try_to_unmap() for anonymous and
+mapped file pages with an additional argument specifying unlock versus unmap
+processing. Again, these functions walk the respective reverse maps looking
+for VM_LOCKED VMAs. When such a VMA is found for anonymous pages and file
+pages mapped in linear VMAs, as in the try_to_unmap() case, the functions
+attempt to acquire the associated mmap semaphore, mlock the page via
+mlock_vma_page() and return SWAP_MLOCK. This effectively undoes the
+pre-clearing of the page's PG_mlocked done by munlock_vma_page.
+
+If try_to_unmap() is unable to acquire a VM_LOCKED VMA's associated mmap
+semaphore, it will return SWAP_AGAIN. This will allow shrink_page_list() to
+recycle the page on the inactive list and hope that it has better luck with the
+page next time.
+
+For file pages mapped into non-linear VMAs, the try_to_munlock() logic works
+slightly differently. On encountering a VM_LOCKED non-linear VMA that might
+map the page, try_to_munlock() returns SWAP_AGAIN without actually mlocking the
+page. munlock_vma_page() will just leave the page unlocked and let vmscan deal
+with it - the usual fallback position.
+
+Note that try_to_munlock()'s reverse map walk must visit every VMA in a page's
+reverse map to determine that a page is NOT mapped into any VM_LOCKED VMA.
+However, the scan can terminate when it encounters a VM_LOCKED VMA and can
+successfully acquire the VMA's mmap semaphore for read and mlock the page.
+Although try_to_munlock() might be called a great many times when munlocking a
+large region or tearing down a large address space that has been mlocked via
+mlockall(), overall this is a fairly rare event.
+
+
+PAGE RECLAIM IN shrink_*_list()
+-------------------------------
+
+shrink_active_list() culls any obviously unevictable pages - i.e.
+!page_evictable(page) - diverting these to the unevictable list.
+However, shrink_active_list() only sees unevictable pages that made it onto the
+active/inactive lru lists. Note that these pages do not have PageUnevictable
+set - otherwise they would be on the unevictable list and shrink_active_list
+would never see them.
+
+Some examples of these unevictable pages on the LRU lists are:
+
+ (1) ramfs pages that have been placed on the LRU lists when first allocated.
+
+ (2) SHM_LOCK'd shared memory pages. shmctl(SHM_LOCK) does not attempt to
+ allocate or fault in the pages in the shared memory region. This happens
+ when an application accesses the page the first time after SHM_LOCK'ing
+ the segment.
+
+ (3) mlocked pages that could not be isolated from the LRU and moved to the
+ unevictable list in mlock_vma_page().
+
+ (4) Pages mapped into multiple VM_LOCKED VMAs, but try_to_munlock() couldn't
+ acquire the VMA's mmap semaphore to test the flags and set PageMlocked.
+ munlock_vma_page() was forced to let the page back on to the normal LRU
+ list for vmscan to handle.
+
+shrink_inactive_list() also diverts any unevictable pages that it finds on the
+inactive lists to the appropriate zone's unevictable list.
+
+shrink_inactive_list() should only see SHM_LOCK'd pages that became SHM_LOCK'd
+after shrink_active_list() had moved them to the inactive list, or pages mapped
+into VM_LOCKED VMAs that munlock_vma_page() couldn't isolate from the LRU to
+recheck via try_to_munlock(). shrink_inactive_list() won't notice the latter,
+but will pass on to shrink_page_list().
+
+shrink_page_list() again culls obviously unevictable pages that it could
+encounter for similar reason to shrink_inactive_list(). Pages mapped into
+VM_LOCKED VMAs but without PG_mlocked set will make it all the way to
+try_to_unmap(). shrink_page_list() will divert them to the unevictable list
+when try_to_unmap() returns SWAP_MLOCK, as discussed above.
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..64ed63c4f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+zsmalloc
+--------
+
+This allocator is designed for use with zram. Thus, the allocator is
+supposed to work well under low memory conditions. In particular, it
+never attempts higher order page allocation which is very likely to
+fail under memory pressure. On the other hand, if we just use single
+(0-order) pages, it would suffer from very high fragmentation --
+any object of size PAGE_SIZE/2 or larger would occupy an entire page.
+This was one of the major issues with its predecessor (xvmalloc).
+
+To overcome these issues, zsmalloc allocates a bunch of 0-order pages
+and links them together using various 'struct page' fields. These linked
+pages act as a single higher-order page i.e. an object can span 0-order
+page boundaries. The code refers to these linked pages as a single entity
+called zspage.
+
+For simplicity, zsmalloc can only allocate objects of size up to PAGE_SIZE
+since this satisfies the requirements of all its current users (in the
+worst case, page is incompressible and is thus stored "as-is" i.e. in
+uncompressed form). For allocation requests larger than this size, failure
+is returned (see zs_malloc).
+
+Additionally, zs_malloc() does not return a dereferenceable pointer.
+Instead, it returns an opaque handle (unsigned long) which encodes actual
+location of the allocated object. The reason for this indirection is that
+zsmalloc does not keep zspages permanently mapped since that would cause
+issues on 32-bit systems where the VA region for kernel space mappings
+is very small. So, before using the allocating memory, the object has to
+be mapped using zs_map_object() to get a usable pointer and subsequently
+unmapped using zs_unmap_object().
+
+stat
+----
+
+With CONFIG_ZSMALLOC_STAT, we could see zsmalloc internal information via
+/sys/kernel/debug/zsmalloc/<user name>. Here is a sample of stat output:
+
+# cat /sys/kernel/debug/zsmalloc/zram0/classes
+
+ class size almost_full almost_empty obj_allocated obj_used pages_used pages_per_zspage
+ ..
+ ..
+ 9 176 0 1 186 129 8 4
+ 10 192 1 0 2880 2872 135 3
+ 11 208 0 1 819 795 42 2
+ 12 224 0 1 219 159 12 4
+ ..
+ ..
+
+
+class: index
+size: object size zspage stores
+almost_empty: the number of ZS_ALMOST_EMPTY zspages(see below)
+almost_full: the number of ZS_ALMOST_FULL zspages(see below)
+obj_allocated: the number of objects allocated
+obj_used: the number of objects allocated to the user
+pages_used: the number of pages allocated for the class
+pages_per_zspage: the number of 0-order pages to make a zspage
+
+We assign a zspage to ZS_ALMOST_EMPTY fullness group when:
+ n <= N / f, where
+n = number of allocated objects
+N = total number of objects zspage can store
+f = fullness_threshold_frac(ie, 4 at the moment)
+
+Similarly, we assign zspage to:
+ ZS_ALMOST_FULL when n > N / f
+ ZS_EMPTY when n == 0
+ ZS_FULL when n == N
diff --git a/kernel/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt b/kernel/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..00c3d31e7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/kernel/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+Overview:
+
+Zswap is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes pages that are
+in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them into a
+dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool. zswap basically trades CPU cycles
+for potentially reduced swap I/O.  This trade-off can also result in a
+significant performance improvement if reads from the compressed cache are
+faster than reads from a swap device.
+
+NOTE: Zswap is a new feature as of v3.11 and interacts heavily with memory
+reclaim. This interaction has not been fully explored on the large set of
+potential configurations and workloads that exist. For this reason, zswap
+is a work in progress and should be considered experimental.
+
+Some potential benefits:
+* Desktop/laptop users with limited RAM capacities can mitigate the
+    performance impact of swapping.
+* Overcommitted guests that share a common I/O resource can
+    dramatically reduce their swap I/O pressure, avoiding heavy handed I/O
+ throttling by the hypervisor. This allows more work to get done with less
+ impact to the guest workload and guests sharing the I/O subsystem
+* Users with SSDs as swap devices can extend the life of the device by
+    drastically reducing life-shortening writes.
+
+Zswap evicts pages from compressed cache on an LRU basis to the backing swap
+device when the compressed pool reaches its size limit. This requirement had
+been identified in prior community discussions.
+
+To enabled zswap, the "enabled" attribute must be set to 1 at boot time. e.g.
+zswap.enabled=1
+
+Design:
+
+Zswap receives pages for compression through the Frontswap API and is able to
+evict pages from its own compressed pool on an LRU basis and write them back to
+the backing swap device in the case that the compressed pool is full.
+
+Zswap makes use of zbud for the managing the compressed memory pool. Each
+allocation in zbud is not directly accessible by address. Rather, a handle is
+returned by the allocation routine and that handle must be mapped before being
+accessed. The compressed memory pool grows on demand and shrinks as compressed
+pages are freed. The pool is not preallocated.
+
+When a swap page is passed from frontswap to zswap, zswap maintains a mapping
+of the swap entry, a combination of the swap type and swap offset, to the zbud
+handle that references that compressed swap page. This mapping is achieved
+with a red-black tree per swap type. The swap offset is the search key for the
+tree nodes.
+
+During a page fault on a PTE that is a swap entry, frontswap calls the zswap
+load function to decompress the page into the page allocated by the page fault
+handler.
+
+Once there are no PTEs referencing a swap page stored in zswap (i.e. the count
+in the swap_map goes to 0) the swap code calls the zswap invalidate function,
+via frontswap, to free the compressed entry.
+
+Zswap seeks to be simple in its policies. Sysfs attributes allow for one user
+controlled policy:
+* max_pool_percent - The maximum percentage of memory that the compressed
+ pool can occupy.
+
+Zswap allows the compressor to be selected at kernel boot time by setting the
+“compressor” attribute. The default compressor is lzo. e.g.
+zswap.compressor=deflate
+
+A debugfs interface is provided for various statistic about pool size, number
+of pages stored, and various counters for the reasons pages are rejected.