NUMA(4)                FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual                NUMA(4)

NAME
     NUMA - Non-Uniform Memory Access

SYNOPSIS
     options MAXMEMDOM
     options NUMA

DESCRIPTION
     Non-Uniform Memory Access is a computer architecture design which
     involves unequal costs between processors, memory and IO devices in a
     given system.

     In a NUMA architecture, the latency to access specific memory or IO
     devices depends upon which processor the memory or device is attached to.
     Accessing memory local to a processor is faster than accessing memory
     that is connected to one of the other processors.  FreeBSD implements
     NUMA-aware memory allocation policies.  By default it attempts to ensure
     that allocations are balanced across each domain.  Users may override the
     default domain selection policy using cpuset(1).

     NUMA support is enabled when the NUMA option is specified in the kernel
     configuration file.  Each platform defines the MAXMEMDOM constant, which
     specifies the maximum number of supported NUMA domains.  This constant
     may be specified in the kernel configuration file.  NUMA support can be
     disabled at boot time by setting the vm.numa.disabled tunable to 1.
     Other values for this tunable are currently ignored.

     Thread and process NUMA policies are controlled with the
     cpuset_getdomain(2) and cpuset_setdomain(2) syscalls.  The cpuset(1) tool
     is available for starting processes with a non-default policy, or to
     change the policy of an existing thread or process.  See SMP(4) for
     information about CPU to domain mapping.

     Systems with non-uniform access to I/O devices may mark those devices
     with the local VM domain identifier.  Drivers can find out their local
     domain information by calling bus_get_domain(9).

   MIB Variables
     The operation of NUMA is controlled and exposes information with these
     sysctl(8) MIB variables:

     vm.ndomains
             The number of VM domains which have been detected.

     vm.phys_locality
             A table indicating the relative cost of each VM domain to each
             other.  A value of 10 indicates equal cost.  A value of -1 means
             the locality map is not available or no locality information is
             available.

     vm.phys_segs
             The map of physical memory, grouped by VM domain.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
     The current NUMA implementation is VM-focused.  The hardware NUMA domains
     are mapped into a contiguous, non-sparse VM domain space, starting from
     0.  Thus, VM domain information (for example, the domain identifier) is
     not necessarily the same as is found in the hardware specific
     information.  Policy information is available in both struct thread and
     struct proc.

SEE ALSO
     cpuset(1), cpuset_getaffinity(2), cpuset_setaffinity(2), SMP(4),
     bus_get_domain(9)

HISTORY
     NUMA first appeared in FreeBSD 9.0 as a first-touch allocation policy
     with a fail-over to round-robin allocation and was not configurable.  It
     was then modified in FreeBSD 10.0 to implement a round-robin allocation
     policy and was also not configurable.

     The numa_getaffinity(2) and numa_setaffinity(2) syscalls and the
     numactl(1) tool first appeared in FreeBSD 11.0 and were removed in
     FreeBSD 12.0.  The current implementation appeared in FreeBSD 12.0.

AUTHORS
     This manual page written by Adrian Chadd <adrian@FreeBSD.org>.

NOTES
     No statistics are kept to indicate how often NUMA allocation policies
     succeed or fail.

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6        October 22, 2018        FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6