On 06.08.21 17:36, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
On 8/5/21 9:02 PM, Zi Yan wrote:
From: Zi Yan <ziy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Patch 3 restores the pfn_valid_within() check when buddy allocator can merge
pages across memory sections. The check was removed when ARM64 gets rid of holes
in zones, but holes can appear in zones again after this patchset.
To me that's most unwelcome resurrection. I kinda missed it was going away and
now I can't even rejoice? I assume the systems that will be bumping max_order
have a lot of memory. Are they going to have many holes? What if we just
sacrificed the memory that would have a hole and don't add it to buddy at all?
I think the old implementation was just horrible and the description we
have here still suffers from that old crap: "but holes can appear in
zones again". No, it's not related to holes in zones at all. We can have
MAX_ORDER -1 pages that are partially a hole.
And to be precise, "hole" here means "there is no memmap" and not "there
is a hole but it has a valid memmap".
But IIRC, we now have under SPARSEMEM always a complete memmap for a
complete memory sections (when talking about system RAM, ZONE_DEVICE is
different but we don't really care for now I think).
So instead of introducing what we had before, I think we should look
into something that doesn't confuse each person that stumbles over it
out there. What does pfn_valid_within() even mean in the new context?
pfn_valid() is most probably no longer what we really want, as we're
dealing with multiple sections that might be online or offline; in the
old world, this was different, as a MAX_ORDER -1 page was completely
contained in a memory section that was either online or offline.
I'd imagine something that expresses something different in the context
of sparsemem:
"Some page orders, such as MAX_ORDER -1, might span multiple memory
sections. Each memory section has a completely valid memmap if online.
Memory sections might either be completely online or completely offline.
pfn_to_online_page() might succeed on one part of a MAX_ORDER - 1 page,
but not on another part. But it will certainly be consistent within one
memory section."
Further, as we know that MAX_ORDER -1 and memory sections are a power of
two, we can actually do a binary search to identify boundaries, instead
of having to check each and every page in the range.
Is what I describe the actual reason why we introduce pfn_valid_within()
? (and might better introduce something new, with a better fitting name?)
--
Thanks,
David / dhildenb
