Sometimes, firmware may expose interleaved memory layout like this: Early memory node ranges node 1: [mem 0x0000000000000000-0x000000011fffffff] node 2: [mem 0x0000000120000000-0x000000014fffffff] node 1: [mem 0x0000000150000000-0x00000001ffffffff] node 0: [mem 0x0000000200000000-0x000000048fffffff] node 2: [mem 0x0000000490000000-0x00000007ffffffff] In that case, we can see memory blocks assigned to multiple nodes in sysfs: $ ls -l /sys/devices/system/memory/memory21 total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 24 05:27 node1 -> ../../node/node1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 24 05:27 node2 -> ../../node/node2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 65536 Aug 24 05:27 online -r--r--r-- 1 root root 65536 Aug 24 05:27 phys_device -r--r--r-- 1 root root 65536 Aug 24 05:27 phys_index drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Aug 24 05:27 power -r--r--r-- 1 root root 65536 Aug 24 05:27 removable -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 65536 Aug 24 05:27 state lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 24 05:25 subsystem -> ../../../../bus/memory -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 65536 Aug 24 05:25 uevent -r--r--r-- 1 root root 65536 Aug 24 05:27 valid_zones The same applies in the node's directory with a memory21 link in both the node1 and node2's directory. This is wrong but doesn't prevent the system to run. However when later one of these memory blocks is hot-unplugged and then hot-plugged, the system is detecting an inconsistency in the sysfs layout and a BUG_ON() is raised: ------------[ cut here ]------------ kernel BUG at /Users/laurent/src/linux-ppc/mm/memory_hotplug.c:1084! Oops: Exception in kernel mode, sig: 5 [#1] LE PAGE_SIZE=64K MMU=Hash SMP NR_CPUS=2048 NUMA pSeries Modules linked in: rpadlpar_io rpaphp pseries_rng rng_core vmx_crypto gf128mul binfmt_misc ip_tables x_tables xfs libcrc32c crc32c_vpmsum autofs4 CPU: 8 PID: 10256 Comm: drmgr Not tainted 5.9.0-rc1+ #25 NIP: c000000000403f34 LR: c000000000403f2c CTR: 0000000000000000 REGS: c0000004876e3660 TRAP: 0700 Not tainted (5.9.0-rc1+) MSR: 800000000282b033 <SF,VEC,VSX,EE,FP,ME,IR,DR,RI,LE> CR: 24000448 XER: 20040000 CFAR: c000000000846d20 IRQMASK: 0 GPR00: c000000000403f2c c0000004876e38f0 c0000000012f6f00 ffffffffffffffef GPR04: 0000000000000227 c0000004805ae680 0000000000000000 00000004886f0000 GPR08: 0000000000000226 0000000000000003 0000000000000002 fffffffffffffffd GPR12: 0000000088000484 c00000001ec96280 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 GPR16: 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000004 0000000000000003 GPR20: c00000047814ffe0 c0000007ffff7c08 0000000000000010 c0000000013332c8 GPR24: 0000000000000000 c0000000011f6cc0 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 GPR28: ffffffffffffffef 0000000000000001 0000000150000000 0000000010000000 NIP [c000000000403f34] add_memory_resource+0x244/0x340 LR [c000000000403f2c] add_memory_resource+0x23c/0x340 Call Trace: [c0000004876e38f0] [c000000000403f2c] add_memory_resource+0x23c/0x340 (unreliable) [c0000004876e39c0] [c00000000040408c] __add_memory+0x5c/0xf0 [c0000004876e39f0] [c0000000000e2b94] dlpar_add_lmb+0x1b4/0x500 [c0000004876e3ad0] [c0000000000e3888] dlpar_memory+0x1f8/0xb80 [c0000004876e3b60] [c0000000000dc0d0] handle_dlpar_errorlog+0xc0/0x190 [c0000004876e3bd0] [c0000000000dc398] dlpar_store+0x198/0x4a0 [c0000004876e3c90] [c00000000072e630] kobj_attr_store+0x30/0x50 [c0000004876e3cb0] [c00000000051f954] sysfs_kf_write+0x64/0x90 [c0000004876e3cd0] [c00000000051ee40] kernfs_fop_write+0x1b0/0x290 [c0000004876e3d20] [c000000000438dd8] vfs_write+0xe8/0x290 [c0000004876e3d70] [c0000000004391ac] ksys_write+0xdc/0x130 [c0000004876e3dc0] [c000000000034e40] system_call_exception+0x160/0x270 [c0000004876e3e20] [c00000000000d740] system_call_common+0xf0/0x27c Instruction dump: 48442e35 60000000 0b030000 3cbe0001 7fa3eb78 7bc48402 38a5fffe 7ca5fa14 78a58402 48442db1 60000000 7c7c1b78 <0b030000> 7f23cb78 4bda371d 60000000 ---[ end trace 562fd6c109cd0fb2 ]--- This has been seen on PowerPC LPAR. The root cause of this issue is that when node's memory is registered, the range used can overlap another node's range, thus the memory block is registered to multiple node in sysfs. There are 2 issues here: a. The sysfs memory and node's layout are broken due to these multiple links b. The link errors in link_mem_sections() should not lead to a system panic. To address a. register_mem_sect_under_node should not rely on the system state to detect whether the link operation is triggered by a hot plug operation or not. This is addressed by the patch 1 and 2 of this series. The patch 3 is addressing the point b. Laurent Dufour (3): mm: replace memmap_context by memplug_context mm: don't rely on system state to detect hot-plug operations mm: don't panic when links can't be created in sysfs arch/ia64/mm/init.c | 6 ++--- drivers/base/node.c | 40 +++++++++++++++++++++++++--------- include/linux/memory_hotplug.h | 9 ++++++++ include/linux/mm.h | 2 +- include/linux/mmzone.h | 4 ---- include/linux/node.h | 14 +++++++----- mm/memory_hotplug.c | 6 ++--- mm/page_alloc.c | 10 ++++----- 8 files changed, 59 insertions(+), 32 deletions(-) -- 2.28.0