Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754175AbbDPR0q (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Apr 2015 13:26:46 -0400 Received: from mail.linuxfoundation.org ([140.211.169.12]:44175 "EHLO mail.linuxfoundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752298AbbDPR0h (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Apr 2015 13:26:37 -0400 Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2015 10:26:35 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Mel Gorman Cc: Linux-MM , Nathan Zimmer , Daniel Rahn , Davidlohr Bueso , Dave Hansen , Tom Vaden , Scott Norton , LKML Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/14] Parallel memory initialisation Message-Id: <20150416102635.951994a9e362693cbbc0b440@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <20150416084609.GM14842@suse.de> References: <1428920226-18147-1-git-send-email-mgorman@suse.de> <20150416002501.e9615db6.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20150416084609.GM14842@suse.de> X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.4.1 (GTK+ 2.24.23; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2530 Lines: 57 On Thu, 16 Apr 2015 09:46:09 +0100 Mel Gorman wrote: > On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 12:25:01AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > > On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 11:16:52 +0100 Mel Gorman wrote: > > > > > Memory initialisation > > > > I wish we didn't call this "memory initialization". Because memory > > initialization is memset(), and that isn't what we're doing here. > > > > Installation? Bringup? > > > > It's about linking the struct pages to their physical page frame so > "Parallel struct page initialisation"? Works for me. > > I'd hoped the way we were > > going to do this was by bringing up a bit of memory to get booted up, > > then later on we just fake a bunch of memory hot-add operations. So > > the new code would be pretty small and quite high-level. > > That ends up being very complex but of a very different shape. We would > still have to prevent the sections being initialised similar to what this > series does already except the zone boundaries are lower. It's not as > simple as faking mem= because we want local memory on each node during > initialisation. Why do "we want..."? > Later after device_init when sysfs is setup we would then have to walk all > possible sections to discover pluggable memory and hot-add them. However, > when doing it, we would want to first discover what node that section is > local to and ideally skip over the ones that are not local to the thread > doing the work. This means all threads have to scan all sections instead > of this approach which can walk within its own PFN. It then adds pages > one at a time which is slow although obviously that part could be addressed. > > This would be harder to co-ordinate as kswapd is up and running before > the memory hot-add structures are finalised so it would need either a > semaphore or different threads to do the initialisation. The user-visible > impact is then that early in boot, the total amount of memory appears to > be rapidly increasing instead of this approach where the amount of free > memory is increasing. > > Conceptually it's straight forward but the details end up being a lot > more complex than this approach. Could we do most of the think work in userspace, emit a bunch of low-level hotplug operations to the kernel? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/