Linux 6.10 Supports NUMA Balancing For Multi-Size THPs

With the memory management "MM" updates merged for the Linux 6.10 there is now NUMA balancing support for multi-size transparent hugepages (THPs). This is yielding some nice performance results and there is also other work in this new kernel around multi-size THPs.

Baolin Wang of Alibaba spent the past few months working out multi-size THP NUMA balancing support. Long story short, the result of the NUMA balancing support is significant on modern server hardware. In benchmarks of the initial code on a dual socket Intel Xeon Platinum server:

Linux 6.10's memory management update also has improvements to swapping of multi-size THPs, sysfs stats for monitoring multi-size THPs, and other optimizations. The multi-size THP "mTHP" support was merged at the start of the year for allowing the allocation of memory in blocks bigger than a base page but smaller than the traditional PMD size. Leveraging multi-size THPs can lead to less page faults and other efficiency benefits to net greater system performance.

The full list of memory management changes for Linux 6.10 can be found via this pull request that was already merged to Git.