Re: [RFC] Memory Tiering

From: Dave Hansen
Date: Thu Oct 17 2019 - 10:17:08 EST


On 10/17/19 1:07 AM, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> Very interesting topic. I heard similar demand from HPC folks
> (especially involving other memory types ("tiers")). There, I think
> you often want to let the application manage that. But of course, for
> many applications an automatic management might already be
> beneficial.
>
> Am I correct that you are using PMEM in this area along with
> ZONE_DEVICE and not by giving PMEM to the buddy (add_memory())?

The PMEM starts out as ZONE_DEVICE, but we unbind it from its original
driver and bind it to this stub of a "driver": drivers/dax/kmem.c which
uses add_memory() on it.

There's some nice tooling inside the daxctl component of ndctl to do all
the sysfs magic to make this happen.