When enabling dax pmem as RAM device on arm64, I noticed that kmem_start addr in dev_dax_kmem_probe() should be aligned w/ SECTION_SIZE_BITS(30),i.e. 1G memblock size. Even Dan Williams' sub-section patch series [1] had been upstream merged, it was not helpful due to hard limitation of kmem_start: $ndctl create-namespace -e namespace0.0 --mode=devdax --map=dev -s 2g -f -a 2M $echo dax0.0 > /sys/bus/dax/drivers/device_dax/unbind $echo dax0.0 > /sys/bus/dax/drivers/kmem/new_id $cat /proc/iomem ... 23c000000-23fffffff : System RAM 23dd40000-23fecffff : reserved 23fed0000-23fffffff : reserved 240000000-33fdfffff : Persistent Memory 240000000-2403fffff : namespace0.0 280000000-2bfffffff : dax0.0 <- aligned with 1G boundary 280000000-2bfffffff : System RAM Hence there is a big gap between 0x2403fffff and 0x280000000 due to the 1G alignment. Without this series, if qemu creates a 4G bytes nvdimm device, we can only use 2G bytes for dax pmem(kmem) in the worst case. e.g. 240000000-33fdfffff : Persistent Memory We can only use the memblock between [240000000, 2ffffffff] due to the hard limitation. It wastes too much memory space. Decreasing the SECTION_SIZE_BITS on arm64 might be an alternative, but there are too many concerns from other constraints, e.g. PAGE_SIZE, hugetlb, SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP, page bits in struct page ... Beside decreasing the SECTION_SIZE_BITS, we can also relax the kmem alignment with memory_block_size_bytes(). Tested on arm64 guest and x86 guest, qemu creates a 4G pmem device. dax pmem can be used as ram with smaller gap. Also the kmem hotplug add/remove are both tested on arm64/x86 guest. This patch series (mainly patch6/6) is based on the fixing patch, ~v5.8-rc5 [2]. [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/6/19/67 [2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/7/8/1546 Jia He (6): mm/memory_hotplug: remove redundant memory block size alignment check resource: export find_next_iomem_res() helper mm/memory_hotplug: allow pmem kmem not to align with memory_block_size mm/page_alloc: adjust the start,end in dax pmem kmem case device-dax: relax the memblock size alignment for kmem_start arm64: fall back to vmemmap_populate_basepages if not aligned with PMD_SIZE arch/arm64/mm/mmu.c | 4 ++++ drivers/base/memory.c | 24 ++++++++++++++++-------- drivers/dax/kmem.c | 22 +++++++++++++--------- include/linux/ioport.h | 3 +++ kernel/resource.c | 3 ++- mm/memory_hotplug.c | 39 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- mm/page_alloc.c | 14 ++++++++++++++ 7 files changed, 90 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-) -- 2.17.1