[Problem] The current Linux cannot migrate pages used by the kerenl because of the kernel direct mapping. In Linux kernel space, va = pa + PAGE_OFFSET. When the pa is changed, we cannot simply update the pagetable and keep the va unmodified. So the kernel pages are not migratable. There are also some other issues will cause the kernel pages not migratable. For example, the physical address may be cached somewhere and will be used. It is not to update all the caches. When doing memory hotplug in Linux, we first migrate all the pages in one memory device somewhere else, and then remove the device. But if pages are used by the kernel, they are not migratable. As a result, memory used by the kernel cannot be hot-removed. Modifying the kernel direct mapping mechanism is too difficult to do. And it may cause the kernel performance down and unstable. So we use the following way to do memory hotplug. [What we are doing] In Linux, memory in one numa node is divided into several zones. One of the zones is ZONE_MOVABLE, which the kernel won't use. In order to implement memory hotplug in Linux, we are going to arrange all hotpluggable memory in ZONE_MOVABLE so that the kernel won't use these memory. To do this, we need ACPI's help. [How we do this] In ACPI, SRAT(System Resource Affinity Table) contains NUMA info. The memory affinities in SRAT record every memory range in the system, and also, flags specifying if the memory range is hotpluggable. (Please refer to ACPI spec 5.0 5.2.16) With the help of SRAT, we have to do the following two things to achieve our goal: 1. When doing memory hot-add, allow the users arranging hotpluggable as ZONE_MOVABLE. (This has been done by the MOVABLE_NODE functionality in Linux.) 2. when the system is booting, prevent bootmem allocator from allocating hotpluggable memory for the kernel before the memory initialization finishes. (This is what we are going to do. See below.) [About this patch-set] In previous parts' patches, we have obtained SRAT earlier enough, right after memblock is ready. So this patch-set does the following things: 1. Improve memblock to support flags, which are used to indicate different memory type. 2. Mark all hotpluggable memory in memblock.memory[]. 3. Make the default memblock allocator skip hotpluggable memory. 4. Introduce "movablenode" boot option to allow users to enable/disable this functionality. Tang Chen (6): x86, numa, mem_hotplug: Skip all the regions the kernel resides in. memblock, numa: Introduce flag into memblock. memblock, mem_hotplug: Introduce MEMBLOCK_HOTPLUG flag to mark hotpluggable regions. memblock, mem_hotplug: Make memblock skip hotpluggable regions by default. mem-hotplug: Introduce movablenode boot option to {en|dis}able using SRAT. x86, numa, acpi, memory-hotplug: Make movablenode have higher priority. Yasuaki Ishimatsu (1): x86: get pg_data_t's memory from other node Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt | 15 ++++++ arch/x86/kernel/setup.c | 10 +++- arch/x86/mm/numa.c | 5 +- include/linux/memblock.h | 13 +++++ include/linux/memory_hotplug.h | 3 + mm/memblock.c | 92 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------ mm/memory_hotplug.c | 56 +++++++++++++++++++++- mm/page_alloc.c | 31 +++++++++++- 8 files changed, 201 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-) -- 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