Andrew Morton [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed,  5 Feb 2014 09:25:46 +0800 Liu Ping Fan [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

When doing some numa tests on powerpc, I triggered an oops bug. I find
it is caused by using page->_last_cpupid.  It should be initialized as
"-1 & LAST_CPUPID_MASK", but not "-1". Otherwise, in task_numa_fault(),
we will miss the checking (last_cpupid == (-1 & LAST_CPUPID_MASK)).
And finally cause an oops bug in task_numa_group(), since the online cpu is
less than possible cpu.

I grabbed this.  I added this to the changelog:

: PPC needs the LAST_CPUPID_NOT_IN_PAGE_FLAGS case because ppc needs to
: support a large physical address region, up to 2^46 but small section size
: (2^24).  So when NR_CPUS grows up, it is easily to cause
: not-in-page-flags.

to hopefully address Peter's observation.

How should we proceed with this?  I'm getting the impression that numa
balancing on ppc is a dead duck in 3.14, so perhaps this and 

powerpc-mm-add-new-set-flag-argument-to-pte-pmd-update-function.patch
mm-dirty-accountable-change-only-apply-to-non-prot-numa-case.patch
mm-use-ptep-pmdp_set_numa-for-updating-_page_numa-bit.patch

All these are already in 3.14  ?

are 3.15-rc1 material?

We should push the first hunk to 3.14. I will wait for Liu to redo the
patch. BTW this should happen only when SPARSE_VMEMMAP is not
specified. Srikar had reported the issue here

http://mid.gmane.org/20140219180200.GA29257@linux.vnet.ibm.com

#if defined(CONFIG_SPARSEMEM) && !defined(CONFIG_SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP)
#define SECTIONS_WIDTH		SECTIONS_SHIFT
#else
#define SECTIONS_WIDTH		0
#endif

-aneesh