On 07/19/16 at 09:07pm, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > zhongjiang <zhongjiang@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > From: zhong jiang <zhongjiang@xxxxxxxxxx> > > > > I hit the following question when run trinity in my system. The > > kernel is 3.4 version. but the mainline have same question to be > > solved. The root cause is the segment size is too large, it can > > expand the most of the area or the whole memory, therefore, it > > may waste an amount of time to abtain a useable page. and other > > cases will block until the test case quit. at the some time, > > OOM will come up. > > 5MiB is way too small. I have seen vmlinux images not to mention > ramdisks that get larger than that. Depending on the system > 1GiB might not be an unreasonable ramdisk size. AKA run an entire live > system out of a ramfs. It works well if you have enough memory. There was a use case from Michael Holzheu about a 1.5G ramdisk, see below kexec-tools commit: commit 95741713e790fa6bde7780bbfb772ad88e81a744 Author: Michael Holzheu <holzheu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri Oct 30 16:02:04 2015 +0100 kexec/s390x: use mmap instead of read for slurp_file() The slurp_fd() function allocates memory and uses the read() system call. This results in double memory consumption for image and initrd: 1) Memory allocated in user space by the kexec tool 2) Memory allocated in kernel by the kexec() system call The following illustrates the use case that we have on s390x: 1) Boot a 4 GB Linux system 2) Copy kernel and 1,5 GB ramdisk from external source into tmpfs (ram) 3) Use kexec to boot kernel with ramdisk Therefore for kexec runtime we need: 1,5 GB (tmpfs) + 1,5 GB (kexec malloc) + 1,5 GB (kernel memory) = 4,5 GB This patch introduces slurp_file_mmap() which for "normal" files uses mmap() instead of malloc()/read(). This reduces the runtime memory consumption of the kexec tool as follows: 1,5 GB (tmpfs) + 1,5 GB (kernel memory) = 3 GB Signed-off-by: Michael Holzheu <holzheu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Dave Young <dyoung@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Simon Horman <horms@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > > I think there is a practical limit at about 50% of memory (because we > need two copies in memory the source and the destination pages), but > anything else is pretty much reasonable and should have a fair chance of > working. > > A limit that reflected that reality above would be interesting. > Anything else will likely cause someone trouble in the futrue. Maybe one should test his ramdisk first to ensure it works first before really using it. Thanks Dave -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>