Re: [RFC PATCH 3/5] mm, memory_hotplug: allocate memmap from the added memory range for sparse-vmemmap

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Wed 26-07-17 19:20:39, Gerald Schaefer wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Jul 2017 14:30:41 +0200
> Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed 26-07-17 13:45:39, Heiko Carstens wrote:
> > [...]
> > > In general I do like your idea, however if I understand your patches
> > > correctly we might have an ordering problem on s390: it is not possible to
> > > access hot-added memory on s390 before it is online (MEM_GOING_ONLINE
> > > succeeded).
> > 
> > Could you point me to the code please? I cannot seem to find the
> > notifier which implements that.
> 
> It is in drivers/s390/char/sclp_cmd.c: sclp_mem_notifier(). 

Thanks for the pointer. I will have a look.

> > > On MEM_GOING_ONLINE we ask the hypervisor to back the potential available
> > > hot-added memory region with physical pages. Accessing those ranges before
> > > that will result in an exception.
> > 
> > Can we make the range which backs the memmap range available? E.g from
> > s390 specific __vmemmap_populate path?
> 
> No, only the complete range of a storage increment can be made available.
> The size of those increments may vary between z/VM and LPAR, but at least
> with LPAR it will always be minimum 256 MB, IIRC.

Is there any problem doing that before we even get to __add_pages - e.g.
in arch_add_memory? X86 already does something along those lines by
calling init_memory_mapping AFAIU. Yes it is different thing than s390
but essentially it is preparing the physical address space for the new
memory so it is not that far away...

> > > However with your approach the memory is still allocated when add_memory()
> > > is being called, correct? That wouldn't be a change to the current
> > > behaviour; except for the ordering problem outlined above.
> > 
> > Could you be more specific please? I do not change when the memmap is
> > allocated.
> 
> I guess this is about the difference between s390 and others, wrt when
> we call add_memory(). It is also in drivers/s390/char/sclp_cmd.c, early
> during memory detection, as opposed to other archs, where I guess this
> could be triggered by an ACPI event during runtime, at least for newly
> added and to-be-onlined memory.

I guess this is trying to answer my question above about arch_add_memory
but I still to grasp what this means.

> This probably means that any approach that tries to allocate memmap
> memory during add_memory(), out of the "to-be-onlined but still offline"
> memory, will be difficult for s390, because we call add_memory() only once
> during memory detection for the complete range of (hypervisor) defined
> online and offline memory. The offline parts are then made available in
> the MEM_GOING_ONLINE notifier called from online_pages(). Only after
> this point the memory would then be available to allocate a memmap in it.

Yes, this scheme is really unfortunate for the mechanism I am proposing
and it is not compatible.

> Nevertheless, we have great interest in such a "allocate memmap from
> the added memory range" solution. I guess we would need some way to
> separate the memmap allocation from add_memory(), which sounds odd,
> or provide some way to have add_memory() only allocate a memmap for
> online memory, and a mechanism to add the memmaps for offline memory
> blocks later when they are being set online.

Well, we cannot move the memmap allocation to later. We do have users
which never online the memory (ZONE_DEVICE). And __add_pages is exactly
about adding memmap for the range. I believe this should be addressed
somewhere at arch_add_memory layer.

Jerome has noted that there will have to be an opt-out from using altmap
becuase his hotplug usecase (HMM) cannot allocate from the added range
as well. So I will use the same thing for the s390 until we figure how
to implement it there for now.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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