linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH 0/14] Parallel memory initialisation

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Date:	Thu, 16 Apr 2015 10:26:35 -0700
From:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>
Cc:	Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>, Nathan Zimmer <nzimmer@....com>,
	Daniel Rahn <drahn@...e.com>,
	Davidlohr Bueso <dbueso@...e.com>,
	Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...el.com>,
	Tom Vaden <tom.vaden@...com>,
	Scott Norton <scott.norton@...com>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/14] Parallel memory initialisation

On Thu, 16 Apr 2015 09:46:09 +0100 Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de> 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 <mgorman@...e.de> 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?

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