Re: [PATCH v1] mm: inititalize struct pages when adding a section

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Mon 30-07-18 13:53:06, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 30.07.2018 13:30, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Fri 27-07-18 18:54:54, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> >> Right now, struct pages are inititalized when memory is onlined, not
> >> when it is added (since commit d0dc12e86b31 ("mm/memory_hotplug: optimize
> >> memory hotplug")).
> >>
> >> remove_memory() will call arch_remove_memory(). Here, we usually access
> >> the struct page to get the zone of the pages.
> >>
> >> So effectively, we access stale struct pages in case we remove memory that
> >> was never onlined. So let's simply inititalize them earlier, when the
> >> memory is added. We only have to take care of updating the zone once we
> >> know it. We can use a dummy zone for that purpose.
> > 
> > I have considered something like this when I was reworking memory
> > hotplug to not associate struct pages with zone before onlining and I
> > considered this to be rather fragile. I would really not like to get
> > back to that again if possible.
> > 
> >> So effectively, all pages will already be initialized and set to
> >> reserved after memory was added but before it was onlined (and even the
> >> memblock is added). We only inititalize pages once, to not degrade
> >> performance.
> > 
> > To be honest, I would rather see d0dc12e86b31 reverted. It is late in
> > the release cycle and if the patch is buggy then it should be reverted
> > rather than worked around. I found the optimization not really
> > convincing back then and this is still the case TBH.
> > 
> 
> If I am not wrong, that's already broken in 4.17, no? What about that?

Ohh, I thought this was merged in 4.18.
$ git describe --contains d0dc12e86b31 --match="v*"
v4.17-rc1~99^2~44

proves me wrong. This means that the fix is not so urgent as I thought.
If you can figure out a reasonable fix then it should be preferable to
the revert.

Fake zone sounds too hackish to me though.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs