Chapter 9. NUMA

Historically, all memory on x86 systems is equally accessible by all CPUs. Known as Uniform Memory Access (UMA), access times are the same no matter which CPU performs the operation.

This behavior is no longer the case with recent x86 processors. In Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA), system memory is divided into zones (called nodes), which are allocated to particular CPUs or sockets. Access to memory that is local to a CPU is faster than memory connected to remote CPUs on that system.

This chapter describes memory allocation and NUMA tuning configurations in virtualized environments.