On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 12:40 PM David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: [..] > >>>> I'm still struggling to understand the motivation of distinguishing > >>>> "active" as something distinct from "online". As long as the "online" > >>>> granularity is improved from sections down to subsections then most > >>>> code paths are good to go. The others can use get_devpagemap() to > >>>> check for ZONE_DEVICE in a race free manner as they currently do. > >>> > >>> I thought we wanted to unify access if we don’t really care about the zone as in most pfn walkers - E.g., for zone shrinking. > >> > >> Agree, when the zone does not matter, which is most cases, then > >> pfn_online() and pfn_valid() are sufficient. > > Oh, and just to clarify why I proposed pfn_active(): The issue right now is that a PFN that is valid but not online could be offline memory (memmap not initialized) or ZONE_DEVICE. That‘s why I wanted to have a way to detect if a memmap was initialized, independent of the zone. That‘s important for generic PFN walkers. That's what I was debating with Toshiki [1], whether there is a real example of needing to distinguish ZONE_DEVICE from offline memory in a pfn walker. The proposed use case in this patch set of being able to set hwpoison on ZONE_DEVICE pages does not seem like a good idea to me. My suspicion is that this is a common theme and others are looking to do these types page manipulations that only make sense for online memory. If that is the case then treating ZONE_DEVICE as offline seems the right direction. [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/CAPcyv4joVDwiL21PPyJ7E_mMFR2SL3QTi09VMtfxb_W+-1p8vQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
