On Thu, 2012-11-29 at 10:25 +0800, Jiang Liu wrote: > On 2012-11-29 9:42, Jaegeuk Hanse wrote: > > On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 04:47:42PM +0800, Jiang Liu wrote: > >> Hi all, > >> Seems it's a great chance to discuss about the memory hotplug feature > >> within this thread. So I will try to give some high level thoughts about memory > >> hotplug feature on x86/IA64. Any comments are welcomed! > >> First of all, I think usability really matters. Ideally, memory hotplug > >> feature should just work out of box, and we shouldn't expect administrators to > >> add several extra platform dependent parameters to enable memory hotplug. > >> But how to enable memory (or CPU/node) hotplug out of box? I think the key point > >> is to cooperate with BIOS/ACPI/firmware/device management teams. > >> I still position memory hotplug as an advanced feature for high end > >> servers and those systems may/should provide some management interfaces to > >> configure CPU/memory/node hotplug features. The configuration UI may be provided > >> by BIOS, BMC or centralized system management suite. Once administrator enables > >> hotplug feature through those management UI, OS should support system device > >> hotplug out of box. For example, HP SuperDome2 management suite provides interface > >> to configure a node as floating node(hot-removable). And OpenSolaris supports > >> CPU/memory hotplug out of box without any extra configurations. So we should > >> shape interfaces between firmware and OS to better support system device hotplug. Well described. I agree with you. I am also OK to have the boot option for the time being, but we should be able to get the info from ACPI for better TCE. > >> On the other hand, I think there are no commercial available x86/IA64 > >> platforms with system device hotplug capabilities in the field yet, at least only > >> limited quantity if any. So backward compatibility is not a big issue for us now. HP SuperDome is IA64-based and supports node hotplug when running with HP-UX. It implements vendor-unique ACPI interface to describe movable memory ranges. > >> So I think it's doable to rely on firmware to provide better support for system > >> device hotplug. > >> Then what should be enhanced to better support system device hotplug? > >> > >> 1) ACPI specification should be enhanced to provide a static table to describe > >> components with hotplug features, so OS could reserve special resources for > >> hotplug at early boot stages. For example, to reserve enough CPU ids for CPU > >> hot-add. Currently we guess maximum number of CPUs supported by the platform > >> by counting CPU entries in APIC table, that's not reliable. Right. HP SuperDome implements vendor-unique ACPI interface for this as well. For Linux, it is nice to have a standard interface defined. > >> 2) BIOS should implement SRAT, MPST and PMTT tables to better support memory > >> hotplug. SRAT associates memory ranges with proximity domains with an extra > >> "hotpluggable" flag. PMTT provides memory device topology information, such > >> as "socket->memory controller->DIMM". MPST is used for memory power management > >> and provides a way to associate memory ranges with memory devices in PMTT. > >> With all information from SRAT, MPST and PMTT, OS could figure out hotplug > >> memory ranges automatically, so no extra kernel parameters needed. I agree that using SRAT is a good compromise. The hotpluggable flag is supposed to indicate the platform's capability, but could use for this purpose until we have a better interface defined. > >> 3) Enhance ACPICA to provide a method to scan static ACPI tables before > >> memory subsystem has been initialized because OS need to access SRAT, > >> MPST and PMTT when initializing memory subsystem. I do not think this is an ACPICA issue. HP-UX also uses ACPICA, and can access ACPI tables and walk ACPI namespace during early boot-time. This is achieved by the acpi_os layer to use special early boot-time memory allocator at early boot-time. Therefore, boot-time and hot-add config code are very consistent in HP-UX. > >> 4) The last and the most important issue is how to minimize performance > >> drop caused by memory hotplug. As proposed by this patchset, once we > >> configure all memory of a NUMA node as movable, it essentially disable > >> NUMA optimization of kernel memory allocation from that node. According > >> to experience, that will cause huge performance drop. We have observed > >> 10-30% performance drop with memory hotplug enabled. And on another > >> OS the average performance drop caused by memory hotplug is about 10%. > >> If we can't resolve the performance drop, memory hotplug is just a feature > >> for demo:( With help from hardware, we do have some chances to reduce > >> performance penalty caused by memory hotplug. > >> As we know, Linux could migrate movable page, but can't migrate > >> non-movable pages used by kernel/DMA etc. And the most hard part is how > >> to deal with those unmovable pages when hot-removing a memory device. > >> Now hardware has given us a hand with a technology named memory migration, > >> which could transparently migrate memory between memory devices. There's > >> no OS visible changes except NUMA topology before and after hardware memory > >> migration. > >> And if there are multiple memory devices within a NUMA node, > >> we could configure some memory devices to host unmovable memory and the > >> other to host movable memory. With this configuration, there won't be > >> bigger performance drop because we have preserved all NUMA optimizations. > >> We also could achieve memory hotplug remove by: > >> 1) Use existing page migration mechanism to reclaim movable pages. > >> 2) For memory devices hosting unmovable pages, we need: > >> 2.1) find a movable memory device on other nodes with enough capacity > >> and reclaim it. > >> 2.2) use hardware migration technology to migrate unmovable memory to > >> the just reclaimed memory device on other nodes. >>> > >> I hope we could expect users to adopt memory hotplug technology > >> with all these implemented. > >> > >> Back to this patch, we could rely on the mechanism provided > >> by it to automatically mark memory ranges as movable with information > >>from ACPI SRAT/MPST/PMTT tables. So we don't need administrator to > >> manually configure kernel parameters to enable memory hotplug. Right. Thanks, -Toshi -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
