Re: your mail

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Mon 17-04-17 14:47:20, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 15, 2017 at 02:17:31PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > Hi,
> > here I 3 more preparatory patches which I meant to send on Thursday but
> > forgot... After more thinking about pfn walkers I have realized that
> > the current code doesn't check offline holes in zones. From a quick
> > review that doesn't seem to be a problem currently. Pfn walkers can race
> > with memory offlining and with the original hotplug impementation those
> > offline pages can change the zone but I wasn't able to find any serious
> > problem other than small confusion. The new hotplug code, will not have
> > any valid zone, though so those code paths should check PageReserved
> > to rule offline holes. I hope I have addressed all of them in these 3
> > patches. I would appreciate if Vlastimil and Jonsoo double check after
> > me.
> 
> Hello, Michal.
> 
> s/Jonsoo/Joonsoo. :)

ups, sorry about that.

> I'm not sure that it's a good idea to add PageResereved() check in pfn
> walkers. First, this makes struct page validity check as two steps,
> pfn_valid() and then PageResereved().

Yes, those are two separate checkes because semantically they are
different. Not all pfn walkers do care about the online status.

> If we should not use struct page
> in this case, it's better to pfn_valid() returns false rather than
> adding a separate check. Anyway, we need to fix more places (all pfn
> walker?) if we want to check validity by two steps.

Which pfn walkers you have in mind?

> The other problem I found is that your change will makes some
> contiguous zones to be considered as non-contiguous. Memory allocated
> by memblock API is also marked as PageResereved. If we consider this as
> a hole, we will set such a zone as non-contiguous.

Why would that be a problem? We shouldn't touch those pages anyway?
 
> And, I guess that it's not enough to check PageResereved() in
> pageblock_pfn_to_page() in order to skip these pages in compaction. If
> holes are in the middle of the pageblock, pageblock_pfn_to_page()
> cannot catch it and compaction will use struct page for this hole.

Yes pageblock_pfn_to_page cannot catch it and it wouldn't with the
current implementation anyway. So the implementation won't be any worse
than with the current code. On the other hand offline holes will always
fill the whole pageblock (assuming those are not spanning multiple
memblocks).
 
> Therefore, I think that making pfn_valid() return false for not
> onlined memory is a better solution for this problem. I don't know the
> implementation detail for hotplug and I don't see your recent change
> but we may defer memmap initialization until the zone is determined.
> It will make pfn_valid() return false for un-initialized range.

I am not really sure. pfn_valid is used in many context and its only
purpose is to tell whether pfn_to_page will return a valid struct page
AFAIU.

I agree that having more checks is more error prone and we can add a
helper pfn_to_valid_page or something similar but I believe we can do
that on top of the current hotplug rework. This would require a non
trivial amount of changes and I believe that a lacking check for the
offline holes is not critical - we would (ab)use the lowest zone which
is similar to (ab)using ZONE_NORMAL/MOVABLE with the original code.

Thanks!
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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