Re: [RFC PATCH v2] mm: initialize struct pages reserved by ZONE_DEVICE driver.

[Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw>]

On Tue, 2019-09-17 at 11:49 -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> On 9/17/19 3:13 AM, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > On 17.09.19 04:34, Toshiki Fukasawa wrote:
> > > On 2019/09/09 16:46, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > > > Let's take a step back here to understand the issues I am aware of. I
> > > > think we should solve this for good now:
> > > > 
> > > > A PFN walker takes a look at a random PFN at a random point in time. It
> > > > finds a PFN with SECTION_MARKED_PRESENT && !SECTION_IS_ONLINE. The
> > > > options are:
> > > > 
> > > > 1. It is buddy memory (add_memory()) that has not been online yet. The
> > > > memmap contains garbage. Don't access.
> > > > 
> > > > 2. It is ZONE_DEVICE memory with a valid memmap. Access it.
> > > > 
> > > > 3. It is ZONE_DEVICE memory with an invalid memmap, because the section
> > > > is only partially present: E.g., device starts at offset 64MB within a
> > > > section or the device ends at offset 64MB within a section. Don't access it.
> > > 
> > > I don't agree with case #3. In the case, struct page area is not allocated on
> > > ZONE_DEVICE, but is allocated on system memory. So I think we can access the
> > > struct pages. What do you mean "invalid memmap"?
> > 
> > No, that's not the case. There is no memory, especially not system
> > memory. We only allow partially present sections (sub-section memory
> > hotplug) for ZONE_DEVICE.
> > 
> > invalid memmap == memmap was not initialized == struct pages contains
> > garbage. There is a memmap, but accessing it (e.g., pfn_to_nid()) will
> > trigger a BUG.
> > 
> 
> As long as the page structures exist, they should be initialized to some
> known state. We could set PagePoison for those invalid memmap. It is the

Sounds like you want to run page_init_poison() by default.


> garbage that are in those page structures that can cause problem if a
> struct page walker scan those pages and try to make sense of it.