Working on virtio-mem, I was able to trigger a kernel BUG (with debug options enabled) when removing memory that was never onlined. I was able to reproduce with DIMMs. As far as I can see the same can also happen without debug configs enabled, if we're unlucky and the uninitialized memmap contains selected garbage . The root problem is that we should not try to derive the zone of memory we are removing from the first PFN. The individual memory blocks of a DIMM could be spanned by different ZONEs, multiple ZONES (after being offline and re-onlined) or no ZONE at all (never onlined). Let's process all applicable zones when removing memory so we're on the safe side. In the long term, we want to resize the zones when offlining memory (and before removing ZONE_DEVICE memory), however, that will require more thought (and most probably a new SECTION_ACTIVE / pfn_active() thingy). More details about that in patch #3. Along with the fix, some related cleanups. v1 -> v2: - Include "mm: Introduce for_each_zone_nid()" - "mm/memory_hotplug: Pass nid instead of zone to __remove_pages()" -- Pass the nid instead of the zone and use it to reduce the number of zones to process --- snip --- I gave this a quick test with a DIMM on x86-64: Start with a NUMA-less node 1. Hotplug a DIMM (512MB) to Node 1. 1st memory block is not onlined. 2nd and 4th is onlined MOVABLE. 3rd is onlined NORMAL. :/# echo "online_movable" > /sys/devices/system/memory/memory41/state [...] :/# echo "online_movable" > /sys/devices/system/memory/memory43/state :/# echo "online_kernel" > /sys/devices/system/memory/memory42/state :/# cat /sys/devices/system/memory/memory40/state offline :/# cat /proc/zoneinfo Node 1, zone Normal [...] spanned 32768 present 32768 managed 32768 [...] Node 1, zone Movable [...] spanned 98304 present 65536 managed 65536 [...] Trigger hotunplug. If it succeeds (block 42 can be offlined): :/# cat /proc/zoneinfo Node 1, zone Normal pages free 0 min 0 low 0 high 0 spanned 0 present 0 managed 0 protection: (0, 0, 0, 0, 0) Node 1, zone Movable pages free 0 min 0 low 0 high 0 spanned 0 present 0 managed 0 protection: (0, 0, 0, 0, 0) So all zones were properly fixed up and we don't access the memmap of the first, never-onlined memory block (garbage). I am no longer able to trigger the BUG. I did a similar test with an already populated node. David Hildenbrand (6): mm/memory_hotplug: Exit early in __remove_pages() on BUGs mm: Exit early in set_zone_contiguous() if already contiguous mm/memory_hotplug: Process all zones when removing memory mm/memory_hotplug: Cleanup __remove_pages() mm: Introduce for_each_zone_nid() mm/memory_hotplug: Pass nid instead of zone to __remove_pages() arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c | 4 +-- arch/ia64/mm/init.c | 4 +-- arch/powerpc/mm/mem.c | 3 +- arch/s390/mm/init.c | 4 +-- arch/sh/mm/init.c | 4 +-- arch/x86/mm/init_32.c | 4 +-- arch/x86/mm/init_64.c | 4 +-- include/linux/memory_hotplug.h | 2 +- include/linux/mmzone.h | 5 ++++ mm/memory_hotplug.c | 51 +++++++++++++++++++--------------- mm/memremap.c | 3 +- mm/page_alloc.c | 3 ++ 12 files changed, 46 insertions(+), 45 deletions(-) -- 2.21.0