Re: [PATCH 2/3] mm: Introduce subsection_dev_map

[Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 1:22 PM David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> wrote:
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> > Am 13.11.2019 um 22:12 schrieb Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>:
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 12:40 PM David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> wrote:
> > [..]
> >>>>>> I'm still struggling to understand the motivation of distinguishing
> >>>>>> "active" as something distinct from "online". As long as the "online"
> >>>>>> granularity is improved from sections down to subsections then most
> >>>>>> code paths are good to go. The others can use get_devpagemap() to
> >>>>>> check for ZONE_DEVICE in a race free manner as they currently do.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I thought we wanted to unify access if we don’t really care about the zone as in most pfn walkers - E.g., for zone shrinking.
> >>>>
> >>>> Agree, when the zone does not matter, which is most cases, then
> >>>> pfn_online() and pfn_valid() are sufficient.
> >>
> >> Oh, and just to clarify why I proposed pfn_active(): The issue right now is that a PFN that is valid but not online could be offline memory (memmap not initialized) or ZONE_DEVICE. That‘s why I wanted to have a way to detect if a memmap was initialized, independent of the zone. That‘s important for generic PFN walkers.
> >
> > That's what I was debating with Toshiki [1], whether there is a real
> > example of needing to distinguish ZONE_DEVICE from offline memory in a
> > pfn walker. The proposed use case in this patch set of being able to
> > set hwpoison on ZONE_DEVICE pages does not seem like a good idea to
> > me. My suspicion is that this is a common theme and others are looking
> > to do these types page manipulations that only make sense for online
> > memory. If that is the case then treating ZONE_DEVICE as offline seems
> > the right direction.
>
> Right. At least it would be nice to have for zone shrinking - not sure about the other walkers. We would have to special-case ZONE_DEVICE handling there.
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I think that's ok... It's already zone aware code whereas pfn walkers
are zone unaware and should stay that way if at all possible.

> But as I said, a subsection map for online memory is a good start, especially to fix pfn_to_online_page(). Also, I think this might be a very good thing to have for Oscars memmap-on-memory work (I have a plan in my head I can discuss with Oscar once he has time to work on that again).

Ok, I'll keep an eye out.