Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/862707/rss

Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) systems have an architecture that attaches
memory to “nodes” within the system. CPUs, too, belong to nodes; memory
that is attached to the same node as a CPU will be faster to access (from
that CPU) than memory on other nodes. This aspect of performance has
important implications for programs running on NUMA systems, and the kernel
offers a number of ways for user space to optimize their behavior. The NUMA
abstraction is now being extended, though, and that is driving a need for
new ways of influencing memory allocation; the multi-preference
memory policy patch set is an attempt to meet that need.