Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] Allocate memmap from hotadded memory

[David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>]

On 25.06.19 09:52, Oscar Salvador wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It has been while since I sent previous version [1].
> 
> In this version I added some feedback I got back then, like letting
> the caller decide whether he wants allocating per memory block or
> per memory range (patch#2), and having the chance to disable vmemmap when
> users want to expose all hotpluggable memory to userspace (patch#5).
> 
> [Testing]
> 
> While I could test last version on powerpc, and Huawei's fellows helped me out
> testing it on arm64, this time I could only test it on x86_64.
> The codebase is quite the same, so I would not expect surprises.
> 
>  - x86_64: small and large memblocks (128MB, 1G and 2G)
>  - Kernel module that adds memory spanning multiple memblocks
>    and remove that memory in a different granularity.
> 
> So far, only acpi memory hotplug uses the new flag.
> The other callers can be changed depending on their needs.
> 
> Of course, more testing and feedback is appreciated.
> 
> [Coverletter]
> 
> This is another step to make memory hotplug more usable. The primary
> goal of this patchset is to reduce memory overhead of the hot-added
> memory (at least for SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP memory model). The current way we use
> to populate memmap (struct page array) has two main drawbacks:

Mental note: How will it be handled if a caller specifies "Allocate
memmap from hotadded memory", but we are running under SPARSEMEM where
we can't do this.

> 
> a) it consumes an additional memory until the hotadded memory itself is
>    onlined and
> b) memmap might end up on a different numa node which is especially true
>    for movable_node configuration.
> 
> a) it is a problem especially for memory hotplug based memory "ballooning"
>    solutions when the delay between physical memory hotplug and the
>    onlining can lead to OOM and that led to introduction of hacks like auto
>    onlining (see 31bc3858ea3e ("memory-hotplug: add automatic onlining
>    policy for the newly added memory")).
> 
> b) can have performance drawbacks.
> 
> Another minor case is that I have seen hot-add operations failing on archs
> because they were running out of order-x pages.
> E.g On powerpc, in certain configurations, we use order-8 pages,
> and given 64KB base pagesize, that is 16MB.
> If we run out of those, we just fail the operation and we cannot add
> more memory.

At least for SPARSEMEM, we fallback to vmalloc() to work around this
issue. I haven't looked into the populate_section_memmap() internals
yet. Can you point me at the code that performs this allocation?

> We could fallback to base pages as x86_64 does, but we can do better.
> 
> One way to mitigate all these issues is to simply allocate memmap array
> (which is the largest memory footprint of the physical memory hotplug)
> from the hot-added memory itself. SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP memory model allows
> us to map any pfn range so the memory doesn't need to be online to be
> usable for the array. See patch 3 for more details.
> This feature is only usable when CONFIG_SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP is set.
> 
> [Overall design]:
> 
> Implementation wise we reuse vmem_altmap infrastructure to override
> the default allocator used by vmemap_populate. Once the memmap is
> allocated we need a way to mark altmap pfns used for the allocation.
> If MHP_MEMMAP_{DEVICE,MEMBLOCK} flag was passed, we set up the layout of the
> altmap structure at the beginning of __add_pages(), and then we call
> mark_vmemmap_pages().
> 
> The flags are either MHP_MEMMAP_DEVICE or MHP_MEMMAP_MEMBLOCK, and only differ
> in the way they allocate vmemmap pages within the memory blocks.
> 
> MHP_MEMMAP_MEMBLOCK:
>         - With this flag, we will allocate vmemmap pages in each memory block.
>           This means that if we hot-add a range that spans multiple memory blocks,
>           we will use the beginning of each memory block for the vmemmap pages.
>           This strategy is good for cases where the caller wants the flexiblity
>           to hot-remove memory in a different granularity than when it was added.
> 
> MHP_MEMMAP_DEVICE:
>         - With this flag, we will store all vmemmap pages at the beginning of
>           hot-added memory.
> 
> So it is a tradeoff of flexiblity vs contigous memory.
> More info on the above can be found in patch#2.
> 
> Depending on which flag is passed (MHP_MEMMAP_DEVICE or MHP_MEMMAP_MEMBLOCK),
> mark_vmemmap_pages() gets called at a different stage.
> With MHP_MEMMAP_MEMBLOCK, we call it once we have populated the sections
> fitting in a single memblock, while with MHP_MEMMAP_DEVICE we wait until all
> sections have been populated.
> 
> mark_vmemmap_pages() marks the pages as vmemmap and sets some metadata:
> 
> The current layout of the Vmemmap pages are:
> 
>         [Head->refcount] : Nr sections used by this altmap
>         [Head->private]  : Nr of vmemmap pages
>         [Tail->freelist] : Pointer to the head page
> 
> This is done to easy the computation we need in some places.
> E.g:
> 
> Example 1)
> We hot-add 1GB on x86_64 (memory block 128MB) using
> MHP_MEMMAP_DEVICE:
> 
> head->_refcount = 8 sections
> head->private = 4096 vmemmap pages
> tail's->freelist = head
> 
> Example 2)
> We hot-add 1GB on x86_64 using MHP_MEMMAP_MEMBLOCK:
> 
> [at the beginning of each memblock]
> head->_refcount = 1 section
> head->private = 512 vmemmap pages
> tail's->freelist = head
> 
> We have the refcount because when using MHP_MEMMAP_DEVICE, we need to know
> how much do we have to defer the call to vmemmap_free().
> The thing is that the first pages of the hot-added range are used to create
> the memmap mapping, so we cannot remove those first, otherwise we would blow up
> when accessing the other pages.

So, assuming we add_memory(1GB, MHP_MEMMAP_DEVICE) and then
remove_memory(128MB) of the added memory, this will work?

add_memory(8GB, MHP_MEMMAP_DEVICE)

For 8GB, we will need exactly 128MB of memmap if I did the math right.
So exactly one section. This section will still be marked as being
online (although not pages on it are actually online)?

> 
> What we do is that since when we hot-remove a memory-range, sections are being
> removed sequentially, we wait until we hit the last section, and then we free
> the hole range to vmemmap_free backwards.
> We know that it is the last section because in every pass we
> decrease head->_refcount, and when it reaches 0, we got our last section.
> 
> We also have to be careful about those pages during online and offline
> operations. They are simply skipped, so online will keep them
> reserved and so unusable for any other purpose and offline ignores them
> so they do not block the offline operation.

I assume that they will still be dumped normally by user space. (as they
are described by a "memory resource" and not PG_Offline)

> 
> One thing worth mention is that vmemmap pages residing in movable memory is not a
> show-stopper for that memory to be offlined/migrated away.
> Vmemmap pages are just ignored in that case and they stick around until sections
> referred by those vmemmap pages are hot-removed.
> 
> [1] https://patchwork.kernel.org/cover/10875017/
> 
> Oscar Salvador (5):
>   drivers/base/memory: Remove unneeded check in
>     remove_memory_block_devices
>   mm,memory_hotplug: Introduce MHP_VMEMMAP_FLAGS
>   mm,memory_hotplug: Introduce Vmemmap page helpers
>   mm,memory_hotplug: allocate memmap from the added memory range for
>     sparse-vmemmap
>   mm,memory_hotplug: Allow userspace to enable/disable vmemmap
> 
>  arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c            |   5 +-
>  arch/powerpc/mm/init_64.c      |   7 ++
>  arch/s390/mm/init.c            |   6 ++
>  arch/x86/mm/init_64.c          |  10 +++
>  drivers/acpi/acpi_memhotplug.c |   2 +-
>  drivers/base/memory.c          |  41 +++++++++--
>  drivers/dax/kmem.c             |   2 +-
>  drivers/hv/hv_balloon.c        |   2 +-
>  drivers/s390/char/sclp_cmd.c   |   2 +-
>  drivers/xen/balloon.c          |   2 +-
>  include/linux/memory_hotplug.h |  31 ++++++++-
>  include/linux/memremap.h       |   2 +-
>  include/linux/page-flags.h     |  34 +++++++++
>  mm/compaction.c                |   7 ++
>  mm/memory_hotplug.c            | 152 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------
>  mm/page_alloc.c                |  22 +++++-
>  mm/page_isolation.c            |  14 +++-
>  mm/sparse.c                    |  93 +++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  mm/util.c                      |   2 +
>  19 files changed, 394 insertions(+), 42 deletions(-)
> 

Thanks for doing this, this will be very helpful :)

-- 

Thanks,

David / dhildenb