Hi, since last two RFCs were almost unnoticed (thanks David for the feedback), I decided to re-work some parts to make it more simple and give it a more testing, and drop the RFC, to see if it gets more attention. I also added David's feedback, so now all users of add_memory/__add_memory/ add_memory_resource can specify whether they want to use this feature or not. I also fixed some compilation issues when CONFIG_SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP is not set. [Testing] Testing has been carried out on the following platforms: - x86_64 (small and big memblocks) - powerpc - arm64 (Huawei's fellows) I plan to test it on Xen and Hyper-V, but for now those two will not be using this feature, and neither DAX/pmem. Of course, if this does not find any strong objection, my next step is to work on enabling this on Xen/Hyper-V. [Coverletter] 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). The current way we use to populate memmap (struct page array) has two main drawbacks: a) it consumes an additional memory until the hotadded memory itself 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. I have also seen hot-add operations failing on archs because they were running out of order-x pages. E.g On powerpc, in certain configurations, we use order-8 pages, and given 64KB base pagesize, that is 16MB. If we run out of those, we just fail the operation and we cannot add more memory. We could fallback to base pages as x86_64 does, but we can do better. One way to mitigate all these 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. 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 block will contain reserved area. Large x86 machines will use 2G memblocks so at least one 1G page will be available but this is still not 2G... If that is a problem, we can always configure a fallback strategy to use the current scheme. Since this only works when CONFIG_VMEMMAP_ENABLED is set, we do check for it before setting the flag that allows use to use the feature, no matter if the user wanted it. [Overall design]: Let us say we hot-add 2GB of memory on a x86_64 (memblock size = 128M). That is: - 16 sections - 524288 pages - 8192 vmemmap pages (out of those 524288. We spend 512 pages for each section) The range of pages is: 0xffffea0004000000 - 0xffffea0006000000 The vmemmap range is: 0xffffea0004000000 - 0xffffea0004080000 0xffffea0004000000 is the head vmemmap page (first page), while all the others are "tails". We keep the following information in it: - Head page: - head->_refcount: number of sections - head->private : number of vmemmap pages - Tail page: - tail->freelist : pointer to the head This is done because it eases the work in cases where we have to compute the number of vmemmap pages to know how much do we have to skip etc, and to keep the right accounting to present_pages. When we want to hot-remove the range, we need to be careful because the first pages of that range, are used for the memmap maping, so if we remove those first, we would blow up while accessing the others later on. For that reason we keep the number of sections in head->_refcount, to know how much do we have to defer the free up. Since in a hot-remove operation, sections are being removed sequentially, the approach taken here is that every time we hit free_section_memmap(), we decrease the refcount of the head. When it reaches 0, we know that we hit the last section, so we call vmemmap_free() for the whole memory-range in backwards, so we make sure that the pages used for the mapping will be latest to be freed up. Vmemmap pages are charged to spanned/present_paged, but not to manages_pages. Michal Hocko (3): mm, memory_hotplug: cleanup memory offline path mm, memory_hotplug: provide a more generic restrictions for memory hotplug mm, sparse: rename kmalloc_section_memmap, __kfree_section_memmap Oscar Salvador (1): mm, memory_hotplug: allocate memmap from the added memory range for sparse-vmemmap arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c | 10 +- arch/ia64/mm/init.c | 5 +- arch/powerpc/mm/init_64.c | 7 + arch/powerpc/mm/mem.c | 6 +- arch/powerpc/platforms/powernv/memtrace.c | 2 +- arch/powerpc/platforms/pseries/hotplug-memory.c | 2 +- arch/s390/mm/init.c | 12 +- arch/sh/mm/init.c | 6 +- arch/x86/mm/init_32.c | 6 +- arch/x86/mm/init_64.c | 20 ++- drivers/acpi/acpi_memhotplug.c | 2 +- drivers/base/memory.c | 2 +- drivers/dax/kmem.c | 2 +- drivers/hv/hv_balloon.c | 2 +- drivers/s390/char/sclp_cmd.c | 2 +- drivers/xen/balloon.c | 2 +- include/linux/memory_hotplug.h | 53 ++++++-- include/linux/memremap.h | 2 +- include/linux/page-flags.h | 34 +++++ kernel/memremap.c | 9 +- mm/compaction.c | 6 + mm/memory_hotplug.c | 168 ++++++++++++++++-------- mm/page_alloc.c | 30 ++++- mm/page_isolation.c | 11 ++ mm/sparse.c | 104 +++++++++++++-- mm/util.c | 2 + 26 files changed, 393 insertions(+), 114 deletions(-) -- 2.13.7