On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 1:18 PM Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Persistent memory is cool. But, currently, you have to rewrite > your applications to use it. Wouldn't it be cool if you could > just have it show up in your system like normal RAM and get to > it like a slow blob of memory? Well... have I got the patch > series for you! > > This series adds a new "driver" to which pmem devices can be > attached. Once attached, the memory "owned" by the device is > hot-added to the kernel and managed like any other memory. On > systems with an HMAT (a new ACPI table), each socket (roughly) > will have a separate NUMA node for its persistent memory so > this newly-added memory can be selected by its unique NUMA > node. > > This is highly RFC, and I really want the feedback from the > nvdimm/pmem folks about whether this is a viable long-term > perversion of their code and device mode. It's insufficiently > documented and probably not bisectable either. > > Todo: > 1. The device re-binding hacks are ham-fisted at best. We > need a better way of doing this, especially so the kmem > driver does not get in the way of normal pmem devices. > 2. When the device has no proper node, we default it to > NUMA node 0. Is that OK? > 3. We muck with the 'struct resource' code quite a bit. It > definitely needs a once-over from folks more familiar > with it than I. > 4. Is there a better way to do this than starting with a > copy of pmem.c? So I don't think we want to do patch 2, 3, or 5. Just jump to patch 7 and remove all the devm_memremap_pages() infrastructure and dax_region infrastructure. The driver should be a dead simple turn around to call add_memory() for the passed in range. The hard part is, as you say, arranging for the kmem driver to not stand in the way of typical range / device claims by the dax_pmem device. To me this looks like teaching the nvdimm-bus and this dax_kmem driver to require explicit matching based on 'id'. The attachment scheme would look like this: modprobe dax_kmem echo dax0.0 > /sys/bus/nd/drivers/dax_kmem/new_id echo dax0.0 > /sys/bus/nd/drivers/dax_pmem/unbind echo dax0.0 > /sys/bus/nd/drivers/dax_kmem/bind At step1 the dax_kmem drivers will match no devices and stays out of the way of dax_pmem. It learns about devices it cares about by being explicitly told about them. Then unbind from the typical dax_pmem driver and attach to dax_kmem to perform the one way hotplug. I expect udev can automate this by setting up a rule to watch for device-dax instances by UUID and call a script to do the detach / reattach dance.
