Re: [patch 2/2] enables booting a NUMA system where some nodes haveno memory

From: Martin Bligh
Date: Wed Nov 15 2006 - 21:10:00 EST


Christoph Lameter wrote:
On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Jack Steiner wrote:

I doubt that there is a demand for systems with memoryless nodes. However, if the
DIMM(s) on a node fails, I think the system may perform better
with the cpus on the node enabled than it will if they have to be
disabled.

Right now we do not have the capability to remove memory from a node while the system is running.

If the DIMMs have failed and we boot up and the systems finds out that there is no memory on that node then the cpus can be remapped to the next memory node. That is better than having lots of useless structures allocated.

A node without memory is a node without memory. Simply remapping the
cpus to another node and pretending the world is different does not
make much sense.

Is there some fundamental problem you see with dealing with the nodes
as is? Doesn't seem that hard to me. I'm not asking you to put the
effort in to fixing it, just if you see some fundamental reason why
it can't be fixed?

M.
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