Balance NUMA Merged For Linux 3.8 Kernel

The Balance NUMA branch of the Linux kernel has been merged for the current 3.8 development cycle.

For those unfamiliar with the Balance NUMA work, see the Linux NUMA performance comparison from earlier this month.

The Git merge message mentions for "balancenuma-v11" that the NUMA results with this work may be mixed. "The results are a mixed bag. In my own tests, balancenuma does reasonably well. It's dumb as rocks and does not regress against mainline. On the other hand, Ingo's tests shows that balancenuma is incapable of converging for this workloads driven by perf which is bad but is potentially explained by the lack of scheduler smarts. Thomas' results show balancenuma improves on mainline but falls far short of numacore or autonuma. Srikar's results indicate we all suffer on a large machine with imbalanced node sizes."