On Tue 11-02-20 16:28:39, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 3:44 PM Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Testing this will be a challenge, but the issue was real - a 7GB > > highmem machine isn't crazy and I expect the inode has become larger > > since those days. > > Hmm. I would say that in the intening years a 7GB highmem machine has > indeed become crazy. Absolutely agreed. > It used to be something we kind of supported. And it's been few years since we have been actively discouraging people from using 32b kernels with a lot of memory. There are bug reports popping out from time to time but I do not remember any case where using 64b kernel would be a no-go. So my strong suspicion is that people simply keep their kernels on 32b without a good reason because it tends to work most of the time until they hit one of the lowmem problems and they move over to 64b. > But we really should consider HIGHMEM to be something that is on the > deprecation list. In this day and age, there is no excuse for running > a 32-bit kernel with lots of physical memory. > > And if you really want to do that, and have some legacy hardware with > a legacy use case, maybe you should be using a legacy kernel. > > I'd personally be perfectly happy to start removing HIGHMEM support again. I wouldn't be opposed at all. -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs
