From: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
To: Bob Picco <bob.picco@hp.com>
Subject: Re: x86_64: 2.6.14 with NUMA panics at boot
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 03:12:17 +0100
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Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>,
       Janne M O Heikkinen <jmoheikk@cc.helsinki.fi>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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On Monday 31 October 2005 01:17, Bob Picco wrote:

> This is a slightly modified patch I used on x86_64 for EXTREME testing. The
> original 2.6.13-rc1-mhp1 patch didn't apply cleanly against 2.6.14. It will
> apply with this untested patch.  The patch needs to have arch_sparse_init
> which is only active for SPARSEMEM. This patch was just for testing EXTREME
> on x86_64 NUMA and needs review.
>
> I think the bootmem allocator is being used before initialized.  This
> wouldn't have happened before SPARSEMEM_EXTREME became the default.
>
> If you feel my analysis is correct, I'll generate a cleaner patch and
> test on my 4 way.

Ok the question is - why did nobody submit this patch in time? When
sparse was merged I assumed folks would actually test and maintain
it. But that doesn't seem to be the case? Somewhat surprising.

I personally don't care much about sparsemem right now because it doesn't have 
any advantage and if it's unmaintained would consider to mark it 
CONFIG_BROKEN. That's simply because we can't have highly experimental 
CONFIGs in a production kernel that unsuspecting users can just set and break 
their configuration.

Dave, is there someone in charge for sparsemem on x86-64?

-Andi
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