linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v3 0/5] hugetlb: add support gigantic page allocation at runtime

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Date:	Tue, 22 Apr 2014 17:37:26 -0400
From:	Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@...hat.com>
To:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:	linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	mtosatti@...hat.com, aarcange@...hat.com, mgorman@...e.de,
	andi@...stfloor.org, davidlohr@...com, rientjes@...gle.com,
	isimatu.yasuaki@...fujitsu.com, yinghai@...nel.org,
	riel@...hat.com, n-horiguchi@...jp.nec.com, kirill@...temov.name
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/5] hugetlb: add support gigantic page allocation at
 runtime

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 16:01:10 -0700
Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 13:58:40 -0400 Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@...hat.com> wrote:
> 
> > The HugeTLB subsystem uses the buddy allocator to allocate hugepages during
> > runtime. This means that hugepages allocation during runtime is limited to
> > MAX_ORDER order. For archs supporting gigantic pages (that is, page sizes
> > greater than MAX_ORDER), this in turn means that those pages can't be
> > allocated at runtime.
> 
> Dumb question: what's wrong with just increasing MAX_ORDER?

To be honest I'm not a buddy allocator expert and I'm not familiar with
what is involved in increasing MAX_ORDER. What I do know though is that it's
not just a matter of increasing a macro's value. For example, for sparsemem
support we have this check (include/linux/mmzone.h:1084):

#if (MAX_ORDER - 1 + PAGE_SHIFT) > SECTION_SIZE_BITS
#error Allocator MAX_ORDER exceeds SECTION_SIZE
#endif

I _guess_ it's because we can't allocate more pages than what's within a
section on sparsemem. Can sparsemem and the other stuff be changed to
accommodate a bigger MAX_ORDER? I don't know. Is it worth it to increase
MAX_ORDER and do all the required changes, given that a bigger MAX_ORDER is
only useful for HugeTLB and the archs supporting gigantic pages? I'd guess not.
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