allback". See the updated documentation [next patch] for more information about the implications of this patch. Examples: Starting with: Node 0 HugePages_Total: 0 Node 1 HugePages_Total: 0 Node 2 HugePages_Total: 0 Node 3 HugePages_Total: 0 Default behavior [with or without this patch] balances persistent hugepage allocation across nodes [with sufficient contiguous memory]: sysctl vm.nr_hugepages[_mempolicy]=32 yields: Node 0 HugePages_Total: 8 Node 1 HugePages_Total: 8 Node 2 HugePages_Total: 8 Node 3 HugePages_Total: 8 Of course, we only have nr_hugepages_mempolicy with the patch, but with default mempolicy, nr_hugepages_mempolicy behaves the same as nr_hugepages. Applying mempolicy--e.g., with numactl [using '-m' a.k.a. '--membind' because it allows multiple nodes to be specified and it's easy to type]--we can allocate huge pages on individual nodes or sets of nodes. So, starting from the condition above, with 8 huge pages per node, add 8 more to node 2 using: numactl -m 2 sysctl vm.nr_hugepages_mempolicy=40 This yields: Node 0 HugePages_Total: 8 Node 1 HugePages_Total: 8 Node 2 HugePages_Total: 16 Node 3 HugePages_Total: 8 The incremental 8 huge pages were restricted to node 2 by the specified mempolicy. Similarly, we can use mempolicy to free persistent huge pages from specified nodes: numactl -m 0,1 sysctl vm.nr_hugepages_mempolicy=32 yields: Node 0 HugePages_Total: 4 Node 1 HugePages_Total: 4 Node 2 HugePages_Total: 16 Node 3 HugePages_Total: 8 The 8 huge pages freed were balanced over nodes 0 and 1. [rientjes@google.com: accomodate reworked NODEMASK_ALLOC] Signed-off-by: David Rientjes Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn Acked-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Andi Kleen Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Randy Dunlap Cc: Nishanth Aravamudan Cc: Adam Litke Cc: Andy Whitcroft Cc: Eric Whitney Cc: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds Ógì§ã