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To:     Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>, Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>,
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Cc:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        "Kirill A . Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>,
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        John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>,
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References: <20210805190253.2795604-1-zi.yan@sent.com>
 <40982106-0eee-4e62-7ce0-c4787b0afac4@suse.cz>
From:   David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Organization: Red Hat
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 00/15] Make MAX_ORDER adjustable as a kernel boot time
 parameter.
Message-ID: <72b317e5-c78a-f0bc-fe69-f82261ec252e@redhat.com>
Date:   Fri, 6 Aug 2021 18:16:41 +0200
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On 06.08.21 17:36, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> On 8/5/21 9:02 PM, Zi Yan wrote:
>> From: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
> 
>> 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