Documentation/mm/page_migration.rst

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==============
Page migration
==============

Page migration allows moving 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.

Also see Documentation/mm/hmm.rst for migrating pages to or from device
private memory.

The main intent of page migration is to reduce the latency of memory accesses
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 a 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
https://github.com/numactl/numactl.git). 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 only provides
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.
For example, A NUMA profiler may 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
:ref:`CPUSETS <cpusets>`).
Cpusets allow 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.

In kernel use of migrate_pages()
================================

1. Remove folios from the LRU.

   Lists of folios to be migrated are generated by scanning over
   folios and moving them into lists. This is done by
   calling folio_isolate_lru().

Annotation

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