From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail-qt0-f198.google.com (mail-qt0-f198.google.com [209.85.216.198]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 59F806B0003 for ; Tue, 24 Jul 2018 08:17:21 -0400 (EDT) Received: by mail-qt0-f198.google.com with SMTP id l23-v6so3086138qtp.1 for ; Tue, 24 Jul 2018 05:17:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mx1.redhat.com (mx3-rdu2.redhat.com. [66.187.233.73]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id s127-v6si999891qkh.181.2018.07.24.05.17.20 for (version=TLS1_2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128); Tue, 24 Jul 2018 05:17:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: [PATCH v1 0/2] mm/kdump: exclude reserved pages in dumps References: <20180720123422.10127-1-david@redhat.com> <9f46f0ed-e34c-73be-60ca-c892fb19ed08@suse.cz> <20180723123043.GD31229@dhcp22.suse.cz> <8daae80c-871e-49b6-1cf1-1f0886d3935d@redhat.com> <20180724072536.GB28386@dhcp22.suse.cz> From: David Hildenbrand Message-ID: <8eb22489-fa6b-9825-bc63-07867a40d59b@redhat.com> Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2018 14:17:12 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20180724072536.GB28386@dhcp22.suse.cz> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: Michal Hocko Cc: Vlastimil Babka , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton , Baoquan He , Dave Young , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Hari Bathini , Huang Ying , "Kirill A. Shutemov" , =?UTF-8?Q?Marc-Andr=c3=a9_Lureau?= , Matthew Wilcox , Miles Chen , Pavel Tatashin , Petr Tesarik On 24.07.2018 09:25, Michal Hocko wrote: > On Mon 23-07-18 19:20:43, David Hildenbrand wrote: >> On 23.07.2018 14:30, Michal Hocko wrote: >>> On Mon 23-07-18 13:45:18, Vlastimil Babka wrote: >>>> On 07/20/2018 02:34 PM, David Hildenbrand wrote: >>>>> Dumping tools (like makedumpfile) right now don't exclude reserved pages. >>>>> So reserved pages might be access by dump tools although nobody except >>>>> the owner should touch them. >>>> >>>> Are you sure about that? Or maybe I understand wrong. Maybe it changed >>>> recently, but IIRC pages that are backing memmap (struct pages) are also >>>> PG_reserved. And you definitely do want those in the dump. >>> >>> You are right. reserve_bootmem_region will make all early bootmem >>> allocations (including those backing memmaps) PageReserved. I have asked >>> several times but I haven't seen a satisfactory answer yet. Why do we >>> even care for kdump about those. If they are reserved the nobody should >>> really look at those specific struct pages and manipulate them. Kdump >>> tools are using a kernel interface to read the content. If the specific >>> content is backed by a non-existing memory then they should simply not >>> return anything. >>> >> >> "new kernel" provides an interface to read memory from "old kernel". >> >> The new kernel has no idea about >> - which memory was added/online in the old kernel >> - where struct pages of the old kernel are and what their content is >> - which memory is save to touch and which not >> >> Dump tools figure all that out by interpreting the VMCORE. They e.g. >> identify "struct pages" and see if they should be dumped. The "new >> kernel" only allows to read that memory. It cannot hinder to crash the >> system (e.g. if a dump tool would try to read a hwpoison page). >> >> So how should the "new kernel" know if a page can be touched or not? > > I am sorry I am not familiar with kdump much. But from what I remember > it reads from /proc/vmcore and implementation of this interface should > simply return EINVAL or alike when you try to dump inaccessible memory > range. Oh, and BTW, while something like -EINVAL could work, we usually don't want to try to read certain pages at all (e.g. ballooned pages - accessing the page might work but involves quite some overhead in the hypervisor). So we should either handle this in dump tools (reserved + ...?) or while doing the read similar to XEN (is_ram_page()). I wonder if we could convert the early allocated memory (PG_reserved) at some point (buddy initialized) into ordinary "simply allocated" memory. -- Thanks, David / dhildenb