Hi
I just got sparsemem working on our MIPS 32 platform. I'm not sure if
anyone
has done that before since there seems to be a couple of problems in the
arch specific code.
Well I realize that it is blazingly simple to turn on sparsemem, but for
the idiots (like myself)
out there I created a howto file to put in the Documentation directory
just because I thought
it would be a good idea to have some official info on it written down
somewhere.
it saved me a ton of space by the way. it seems to work great.
Mike
>From a4ff5e171bd9e1f27cfa71df2bf9b338778e0883 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Sundis <sundism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:43:31 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] support sparsemem for mips32
---
arch/mips/kernel/setup.c | 18 +++++++++++++++++-
arch/mips/mm/init.c | 3 +++
include/asm-mips/sparsemem.h | 6 ++++++
3 files changed, 26 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
diff --git a/arch/mips/kernel/setup.c b/arch/mips/kernel/setup.c
index f8a535a..6ff0f72 100644
--- a/arch/mips/kernel/setup.c
+++ b/arch/mips/kernel/setup.c
@@ -405,7 +405,6 @@ static void __init bootmem_init(void)
/* Register lowmem ranges */
free_bootmem(PFN_PHYS(start), size << PAGE_SHIFT);
- memory_present(0, start, end);
}
/*
@@ -417,6 +416,23 @@ static void __init bootmem_init(void)
* Reserve initrd memory if needed.
*/
finalize_initrd();
+
+ /* call memory present for all the ram */
+ for (i = 0; i < boot_mem_map.nr_map; i++) {
+ unsigned long start, end;
+
+ /*
+ * * memory present only usable memory.
+ * */
+ if (boot_mem_map.map[i].type != BOOT_MEM_RAM)
+ continue;
+
+ start = PFN_UP(boot_mem_map.map[i].addr);
+ end = PFN_DOWN(boot_mem_map.map[i].addr
+ + boot_mem_map.map[i].size);
+
+ memory_present(0, start, end);
+ }
}
#endif /* CONFIG_SGI_IP27 */
diff --git a/arch/mips/mm/init.c b/arch/mips/mm/init.c
index 480dec0..9bc6d35 100644
--- a/arch/mips/mm/init.c
+++ b/arch/mips/mm/init.c
@@ -417,6 +417,9 @@ void __init mem_init(void)
for (tmp = highstart_pfn; tmp < highend_pfn; tmp++) {
struct page *page = pfn_to_page(tmp);
+ if (!pfn_valid(tmp))
+ continue;
+
if (!page_is_ram(tmp)) {
SetPageReserved(page);
continue;
diff --git a/include/asm-mips/sparsemem.h b/include/asm-mips/sparsemem.h
index 795ac6c..9faaf59 100644
--- a/include/asm-mips/sparsemem.h
+++ b/include/asm-mips/sparsemem.h
@@ -6,8 +6,14 @@
* SECTION_SIZE_BITS 2^N: how big each section will be
* MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS 2^N: how much memory we can have in that space
*/
+
+#ifndef CONFIG_64BIT
+#define SECTION_SIZE_BITS 27 /* 128 MiB */
+#define MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS 31 /* 2 GiB */
+#else
#define SECTION_SIZE_BITS 28
#define MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS 35
+#endif
#endif /* CONFIG_SPARSEMEM */
#endif /* _MIPS_SPARSEMEM_H */
--
1.5.4.1
>From e68a4c90793f5faff7d9a7a44ff8a447b50535b6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Sundis <sundism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:02:34 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] add sparsemem howto document
---
Documentation/sparsemem.txt | 95 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 files changed, 95 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 Documentation/sparsemem.txt
diff --git a/Documentation/sparsemem.txt b/Documentation/sparsemem.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a9ce4bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/sparsemem.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
+Sparsemem divides up physical memory in your system into N section of M
+bytes. Page tables are created for only those sections that
+actually exist (as far as the sparsemem code is concerned). This allows
+for holes in the physical memory without having to waste space by
+creating page discriptors for those pages that do not exist.
+When page_to_pfn() or pfn_to_page() are called there is a bit of overhead to
+look up the proper memory section to get to the page_table, but this
+is small compared to the memory you are likely to save. So, it's not the
+default, but should be used if you have big holes in physical memory.
+
+Note that discontiguous memory is more closely related to NUMA machines
+and if you are a single CPU system use sparsemem and not discontig.
+It's much simpler.
+
+1) CALL MEMORY_PRESENT()
+Existing sections are recorded once the bootmem allocator is up and running by
+calling the sparsemem function "memory_present(node, pfn_start, pfn_end)" for each
+block of memory that exists in your physical address space. The
+memory_present() function records valid sections in a data structure called
+mem_section[].
+
+2) DETERMINE AND SET THE SIZE OF SECTIONS AND PHYSMEM
+The size of N and M above depend upon your architecture
+and your platform and are specified in the file:
+
+ include/asm-<your_arch>/sparsemem.h
+
+and you should create the following lines similar to below:
+
+ #ifdef CONFIG_YOUR_PLATFORM
+ #define SECTION_SIZE_BITS 27 /* 128 MiB */
+ #endif
+ #define MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS 31 /* 2 GiB */
+
+if they don't already exist, where:
+
+ * SECTION_SIZE_BITS 2^M: how big each section will be
+ * MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS 2^N: how much memory we can have in that
+ space
+
+3) INITIALIZE SPARSE MEMORY
+You should make sure that you initialize the sparse memory code by calling
+
+ bootmem_init();
+ + sparse_init();
+ paging_init();
+
+just before you call paging_init() and after the bootmem_allocator is
+turned on in your setup_arch() code.
+
+4) ENABLE SPARSEMEM IN KCONFIG
+Add a line like this:
+
+ select ARCH_SPARSEMEM_ENABLE
+
+into the config for your platform in arch/<your_arch>/Kconfig. This will
+ensure that turning on sparsemem is enabled for your platform.
+
+5) CONFIG
+Run make menuconfig or make gconfig, as you like, and turn on the sparsemem
+memory model under the "Kernel Type" --> "Memory Model" and then build your
+kernel.
+
+
+6) Gotchas
+
+One trick that I encountered when I was turning this on for MIPS was that there
+was some code in mem_init() that set the "reserved" flag for pages that were not
+valid RAM. This caused my kernel to crash when I enabled sparsemem since those
+pages (and page descriptors) didn't actually exist. I changed my code by adding
+lines like below:
+
+
+ for (tmp = highstart_pfn; tmp < highend_pfn; tmp++) {
+ struct page *page = pfn_to_page(tmp);
+
+ + if (!pfn_valid(tmp))
+ + continue;
+ +
+ if (!page_is_ram(tmp)) {
+ SetPageReserved(page);
+ continue;
+ }
+ ClearPageReserved(page);
+ init_page_count(page);
+ __free_page(page);
+ physmem_record(PFN_PHYS(tmp), PAGE_SIZE, physmem_highmem);
+ totalhigh_pages++;
+ }
+
+
+Once I got that straight, it worked!!!! I saved 10MiB of memory.
+
+
+
--
1.5.4.1
