Hi, this is another step to make the memory hotplug more usable. The primary goal of this patchset is to reduce memory overhead of the hot added memory (at least for SPARSE_VMEMMAP memory model). Currently we use kmalloc to poppulate memmap (struct page array) which has two main drawbacks a) it consumes an additional memory until the hotadded memory itslef is onlined and b) memmap might end up on a different numa node which is especially true for movable_node configuration. a) is problem especially for memory hotplug based memory "ballooning" solutions when the delay between physical memory hotplug and the onlining can lead to OOM and that led to introduction of hacks like auto onlining (see 31bc3858ea3e ("memory-hotplug: add automatic onlining policy for the newly added memory")). b) can have performance drawbacks. One way to mitigate both issues is to simply allocate memmap array (which is the largest memory footprint of the physical memory hotplug) from the hotadded memory itself. VMEMMAP memory model allows us to map any pfn range so the memory doesn't need to be online to be usable for the array. See patch 3 for more details. In short I am reusing an existing vmem_altmap which wants to achieve the same thing for nvdim device memory. I am sending this as an RFC because this has seen only a very limited testing and I am mostly interested about opinions on the chosen approach. I had to touch some arch code and I have no idea whether my changes make sense there (especially ppc). Therefore I would highly appreciate arch maintainers to check patch 2. Patches 4 and 5 should be straightforward cleanups. There is also one potential drawback, though. If somebody uses memory hotplug for 1G (gigantic) hugetlb pages then this scheme will not work for them obviously because each memory section will contain 2MB reserved area. I am not really sure somebody does that and how reliable that can work actually. Nevertheless, I _believe_ that onlining more memory into virtual machines is much more common usecase. Anyway if there ever is a strong demand for such a usecase we have basically 3 options a) enlarge memory sections b) enhance altmap allocation strategy and reuse low memory sections to host memmaps of other sections on the same NUMA node c) have the memmap allocation strategy configurable to fallback to the current allocation. Are there any other concerns, ideas, comments? The patches is based on the current mmotm tree (mmotm-2017-07-12-15-11) Diffstat says arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c | 9 ++++-- arch/ia64/mm/discontig.c | 4 ++- arch/powerpc/mm/init_64.c | 34 ++++++++++++++++------ arch/s390/mm/vmem.c | 7 +++-- arch/sparc/mm/init_64.c | 6 ++-- arch/x86/mm/init_64.c | 13 +++++++-- include/linux/memory_hotplug.h | 7 +++-- include/linux/memremap.h | 34 +++++++++++++++------- include/linux/mm.h | 25 ++++++++++++++-- include/linux/page-flags.h | 18 ++++++++++++ kernel/memremap.c | 6 ---- mm/compaction.c | 3 ++ mm/memory_hotplug.c | 66 +++++++++++++++++++----------------------- mm/page_alloc.c | 25 ++++++++++++++-- mm/page_isolation.c | 11 ++++++- mm/sparse-vmemmap.c | 13 +++++++-- mm/sparse.c | 36 ++++++++++++++++------- 17 files changed, 223 insertions(+), 94 deletions(-) Shortlog Michal Hocko (5): mm, memory_hotplug: cleanup memory offline path mm, arch: unify vmemmap_populate altmap handling mm, memory_hotplug: allocate memmap from the added memory range for sparse-vmemmap mm, sparse: complain about implicit altmap usage in vmemmap_populate mm, sparse: rename kmalloc_section_memmap, __kfree_section_memmap -- 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>