s also required (patch 4/4). Without the machine would grind to a crawl when doing a "make -j" kernel build. Even with this patch the System Time is higher on average, but it seems tolerable. Here are some numbers for kernbench runs on a 2-node, 4cpu, 8Gig RAM Altix in the "make -j" run: wall user sys %cpu ctx sw. sleeps ---- ---- --- ---- ------ ------ No patch 1009 1384 847 258 298170 504402 w/patch, no reclaim 880 1376 667 288 254064 396745 w/patch & reclaim 1079 1385 926 252 291625 548873 These numbers are the average of 2 runs of 3 "make -j" runs done right after system boot. Run-to-run variability for "make -j" is huge, so these numbers aren't terribly useful except to seee that with reclaim the benchmark still finishes in a reasonable amount of time. I also looked at the NUMA hit/miss stats for the "make -j" runs and the reclaim doesn't make any difference when the machine is thrashing away. Doing a "make -j8" on a single node that is filled with page cache pages takes 700 seconds with reclaim turned on and 735 seconds without reclaim (due to remote memory accesses). The simple zone_reclaim syscall program is at http://www.bork.org/~mort/sgi/zone_reclaim.c This patch: This adds an extra switch to the scan_control struct. It simply lets the reclaim code know if its allowed to swap pages out. This was required for a simple per-zone reclaimer. Without this addition pages would be swapped out as soon as a zone ran out of memory and the early reclaim kicked in. Signed-off-by: Martin Hicks Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds ¡¦