On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 10:17:33AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> Why do you think it is wrong to initialize/account pages when they are
> used? Keep in mind that offline pages are not used until they are
> onlined. But vmemmap pages are used since the vmemmap is established
> which happens in the hotadd stage.
Yes, that is true.
vmemmap pages are used right when we populate the vmemmap space.
> > plus the fact that I dislike to place those pages in
> > ZONE_NORMAL, although they are not movable.
> > But I think the vmemmap pages should lay within the same zone the pages
> > they describe, doing so simplifies things, and I do not see any outright
> > downside.
>
> Well, both ways likely have its pros and cons. Nevertheless, if the
> vmemmap storage is independent (which is the case for normal hotplug)
> then the state is consistent over hotadd, {online, offline} N times,
> hotremove cycles. Which is conceptually reasonable as vmemmap doesn't
> go away on each offline.
>
> If you are going to bind accounting to the online/offline stages then
> the accounting changes each time you go through the cycle and depending
> on the onlining type it would travel among zones. I find it quite
> confusing as the storage for vmemmap hasn't changed any of its
> properties.
That is a good point I guess.
vmemmap pages do not really go away until the memory is unplugged.
But I see some questions to raise:
- As I said, I really dislike it tiding vmemmap memory to ZONE_NORMAL
unconditionally and this might result in the problems David mentioned.
I remember David and I discussed such problems but the problems with
zones not being contiguos have also been discussed in the past and
IIRC, we reached the conclusion that a maximal effort should be made
to keep them that way, otherwise other things suffer e.g: compaction
code.
So if we really want to move the initialization/account to the
hot-add/hot-remove stage, I would really like to be able to set the
proper zone in there (that is, the same zone where the memory will lay).
- When moving the initialization/accounting to hot-add/hot-remove,
the section containing the vmemmap pages will remain offline.
It might get onlined once the pages get online in online_pages(),
or not if vmemmap pages span a whole section.
I remember (but maybe David rmemeber better) that that was a problem
wrt. pfn_to_online_page() and hybernation/kdump.
So, if that is really a problem, we would have to care of ot setting
the section to the right state.
- AFAICS, doing all the above brings us to former times were some
initialization/accounting was done in a previous stage, and I remember
it was pushed hard to move those in online/offline_pages().
Are we ok with that?
As I said, we might have to set the right zone in hot-add stage, as
otherwise problems might come up.
Being that case, would not that also be conflating different concepts
at a wrong phases?
Do not take me wrong, I quite like Michal's idea, and from a
conceptually point of view I guess it is the right thing to do.
But when evualating risks/difficulty, I am not really sure.
If we can pull that off while setting the right zone (and must be seen
what about the section state), and the outcome is not ugly, I am all for
it.
Also a middel-ground might be something like I previously mentioned(having
a helper in memory_block_action() to do the right thing, so
offline/online_pages() do not get pouled.
--
Oscar Salvador
SUSE L3
