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+.. _mm_concepts:
+
+=================
+Concepts overview
+=================
+
+The memory management in Linux is complex system that evolved over the
+years and included more and more functionality to support variety of
+systems from MMU-less microcontrollers to supercomputers. The memory
+management for systems without MMU is called ``nommu`` and it
+definitely deserves a dedicated document, which hopefully will be
+eventually written. Yet, although some of the concepts are the same,
+here we assume that MMU is available and CPU can translate a virtual
+address to a physical address.
+
+.. contents:: :local:
+
+Virtual Memory Primer
+=====================
+
+The physical memory in a computer system is a limited resource and
+even for systems that support memory hotplug there is a hard limit on
+the amount of memory that can be installed. The physical memory is not
+necessary contiguous, it might be accessible as a set of distinct
+address ranges. Besides, different CPU architectures, and even
+different implementations of the same architecture have different view
+how these address ranges defined.
+
+All this makes dealing directly with physical memory quite complex and
+to avoid this complexity a concept of virtual memory was developed.
+
+The virtual memory abstracts the details of physical memory from the
+application software, allows to keep only needed information in the
+physical memory (demand paging) and provides a mechanism for the
+protection and controlled sharing of data between processes.
+
+With virtual memory, each and every memory access uses a virtual
+address. When the CPU decodes the an instruction that reads (or
+writes) from (or to) the system memory, it translates the `virtual`
+address encoded in that instruction to a `physical` address that the
+memory controller can understand.
+
+The physical system memory is divided into page frames, or pages. The
+size of each page is architecture specific. Some architectures allow
+selection of the page size from several supported values; this
+selection is performed at the kernel build time by setting an
+appropriate kernel configuration option.
+
+Each physical memory page can be mapped as one or more virtual
+pages. These mappings are described by page tables that allow
+translation from virtual address used by programs to real address in
+the physical memory. The page tables organized hierarchically.
+
+The tables at the lowest level of the hierarchy contain physical
+addresses of actual pages used by the software. The tables at higher
+levels contain physical addresses of the pages belonging to the lower
+levels. The pointer to the top level page table resides in a
+register. When the CPU performs the address translation, it uses this
+register to access the top level page table. The high bits of the
+virtual address are used to index an entry in the top level page
+table. That entry is then used to access the next level in the
+hierarchy with the next bits of the virtual address as the index to
+that level page table. The lowest bits in the virtual address define
+the offset inside the actual page.
+
+Huge Pages
+==========
+
+The address translation requires several memory accesses and memory
+accesses are slow relatively to CPU speed. To avoid spending precious
+processor cycles on the address translation, CPUs maintain a cache of
+such translations called Translation Lookaside Buffer (or
+TLB). Usually TLB is pretty scarce resource and applications with
+large memory working set will experience performance hit because of
+TLB misses.
+
+Many modern CPU architectures allow mapping of the memory pages
+directly by the higher levels in the page table. For instance, on x86,
+it is possible to map 2M and even 1G pages using entries in the second
+and the third level page tables. In Linux such pages are called
+`huge`. Usage of huge pages significantly reduces pressure on TLB,
+improves TLB hit-rate and thus improves overall system performance.
+
+There are two mechanisms in Linux that enable mapping of the physical
+memory with the huge pages. The first one is `HugeTLB filesystem`, or
+hugetlbfs. It is a pseudo filesystem that uses RAM as its backing
+store. For the files created in this filesystem the data resides in
+the memory and mapped using huge pages. The hugetlbfs is described at
+:ref:`Documentation/admin-guide/mm/hugetlbpage.rst <hugetlbpage>`.
+
+Another, more recent, mechanism that enables use of the huge pages is
+called `Transparent HugePages`, or THP. Unlike the hugetlbfs that
+requires users and/or system administrators to configure what parts of
+the system memory should and can be mapped by the huge pages, THP
+manages such mappings transparently to the user and hence the
+name. See
+:ref:`Documentation/admin-guide/mm/transhuge.rst <admin_guide_transhuge>`
+for more details about THP.
+
+Zones
+=====
+
+Often hardware poses restrictions on how different physical memory
+ranges can be accessed. In some cases, devices cannot perform DMA to
+all the addressable memory. In other cases, the size of the physical
+memory exceeds the maximal addressable size of virtual memory and
+special actions are required to access portions of the memory. Linux
+groups memory pages into `zones` according to their possible
+usage. For example, ZONE_DMA will contain memory that can be used by
+devices for DMA, ZONE_HIGHMEM will contain memory that is not
+permanently mapped into kernel's address space and ZONE_NORMAL will
+contain normally addressed pages.
+
+The actual layout of the memory zones is hardware dependent as not all
+architectures define all zones, and requirements for DMA are different
+for different platforms.
+
+Nodes
+=====
+
+Many multi-processor machines are NUMA - Non-Uniform Memory Access -
+systems. In such systems the memory is arranged into banks that have
+different access latency depending on the "distance" from the
+processor. Each bank is referred as `node` and for each node Linux
+constructs an independent memory management subsystem. A node has it's
+own set of zones, lists of free and used pages and various statistics
+counters. You can find more details about NUMA in
+:ref:`Documentation/vm/numa.rst <numa>` and in
+:ref:`Documentation/admin-guide/mm/numa_memory_policy.rst <numa_memory_policy>`.
+
+Page cache
+==========
+
+The physical memory is volatile and the common case for getting data
+into the memory is to read it from files. Whenever a file is read, the
+data is put into the `page cache` to avoid expensive disk access on
+the subsequent reads. Similarly, when one writes to a file, the data
+is placed in the page cache and eventually gets into the backing
+storage device. The written pages are marked as `dirty` and when Linux
+decides to reuse them for other purposes, it makes sure to synchronize
+the file contents on the device with the updated data.
+
+Anonymous Memory
+================
+
+The `anonymous memory` or `anonymous mappings` represent memory that
+is not backed by a filesystem. Such mappings are implicitly created
+for program's stack and heap or by explicit calls to mmap(2) system
+call. Usually, the anonymous mappings only define virtual memory areas
+that the program is allowed to access. The read accesses will result
+in creation of a page table entry that references a special physical
+page filled with zeroes. When the program performs a write, regular
+physical page will be allocated to hold the written data. The page
+will be marked dirty and if the kernel will decide to repurpose it,
+the dirty page will be swapped out.
+
+Reclaim
+=======
+
+Throughout the system lifetime, a physical page can be used for storing
+different types of data. It can be kernel internal data structures,
+DMA'able buffers for device drivers use, data read from a filesystem,
+memory allocated by user space processes etc.
+
+Depending on the page usage it is treated differently by the Linux
+memory management. The pages that can be freed at any time, either
+because they cache the data available elsewhere, for instance, on a
+hard disk, or because they can be swapped out, again, to the hard
+disk, are called `reclaimable`. The most notable categories of the
+reclaimable pages are page cache and anonymous memory.
+
+In most cases, the pages holding internal kernel data and used as DMA
+buffers cannot be repurposed, and they remain pinned until freed by
+their user. Such pages are called `unreclaimable`. However, in certain
+circumstances, even pages occupied with kernel data structures can be
+reclaimed. For instance, in-memory caches of filesystem metadata can
+be re-read from the storage device and therefore it is possible to
+discard them from the main memory when system is under memory
+pressure.
+
+The process of freeing the reclaimable physical memory pages and
+repurposing them is called (surprise!) `reclaim`. Linux can reclaim
+pages either asynchronously or synchronously, depending on the state
+of the system. When system is not loaded, most of the memory is free
+and allocation request will be satisfied immediately from the free
+pages supply. As the load increases, the amount of the free pages goes
+down and when it reaches a certain threshold (high watermark), an
+allocation request will awaken the ``kswapd`` daemon. It will
+asynchronously scan memory pages and either just free them if the data
+they contain is available elsewhere, or evict to the backing storage
+device (remember those dirty pages?). As memory usage increases even
+more and reaches another threshold - min watermark - an allocation
+will trigger the `direct reclaim`. In this case allocation is stalled
+until enough memory pages are reclaimed to satisfy the request.
+
+Compaction
+==========
+
+As the system runs, tasks allocate and free the memory and it becomes
+fragmented. Although with virtual memory it is possible to present
+scattered physical pages as virtually contiguous range, sometimes it is
+necessary to allocate large physically contiguous memory areas. Such
+need may arise, for instance, when a device driver requires large
+buffer for DMA, or when THP allocates a huge page. Memory `compaction`
+addresses the fragmentation issue. This mechanism moves occupied pages
+from the lower part of a memory zone to free pages in the upper part
+of the zone. When a compaction scan is finished free pages are grouped
+together at the beginning of the zone and allocations of large
+physically contiguous areas become possible.
+
+Like reclaim, the compaction may happen asynchronously in ``kcompactd``
+daemon or synchronously as a result of memory allocation request.
+
+OOM killer
+==========
+
+It may happen, that on a loaded machine memory will be exhausted. When
+the kernel detects that the system runs out of memory (OOM) it invokes
+`OOM killer`. Its mission is simple: all it has to do is to select a
+task to sacrifice for the sake of the overall system health. The
+selected task is killed in a hope that after it exits enough memory
+will be freed to continue normal operation.
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/index.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/index.rst
index 8454be6..ceead68 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/index.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/index.rst
@@ -15,12 +15,17 @@ are described in Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt and in `man 5 proc`_.
 
 .. _man 5 proc: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc.5.html
 
+Linux memory management has its own jargon and if you are not yet
+familiar with it, consider reading
+:ref:`Documentation/admin-guide/mm/concepts.rst <mm_concepts>`.
+
 Here we document in detail how to interact with various mechanisms in
 the Linux memory management.
 
 .. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 1
 
+   concepts
    hugetlbpage
    idle_page_tracking
    ksm
