linux-kernel - Re: vmemmap alloc failure in hot_add

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Date:   Thu, 17 Jun 2021 10:42:32 +0200
From:   David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>
To:     Nathan Chancellor <nathan@...nel.org>
Cc:     "K. Y. Srinivasan" <kys@...rosoft.com>,
        Haiyang Zhang <haiyangz@...rosoft.com>,
        Stephen Hemminger <sthemmin@...rosoft.com>,
        Wei Liu <wei.liu@...nel.org>, Dexuan Cui <decui@...rosoft.com>,
        linux-hyperv@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Oscar Salvador <osalvador@...e.de>,
        Hillf Danton <hdanton@...a.com>
Subject: Re: vmemmap alloc failure in hot_add_req()

> It does look like this kernel configuration has
> CONFIG_MEMORY_HOTPLUG_DEFAULT_ONLINE=y.

Okay, so then it's most likely really more of an issue with fragmented 
physical memory -- which is suboptimal but not a show blocker in your setup.

(there are still cases where memory onlining can fail, especially with 
kasan running, but these are rather corner cases)

> 
>> If it's not getting onlined, you easily sport after hotplug e.g., via
>> "lsmem" that there are quite some offline memory blocks.
>>
>> Note that x86_64 code will fallback from populating huge pages to
>> populating base pages for the vmemmap; this can happen easily when under
>> memory pressure.
> 
> Not sure if it is relevant or not but this warning can show up within a
> minute of startup without me doing anything in particular.

I remember that Hyper-V will start with a certain (configured) boot VM 
memory size and once the guest is up and running, use memory stats of 
the guest to decide whether to add (hotplug) or remove (balloon inflate) 
memory from the VM.

So this could just be Hyper-V trying to apply its heuristics.

> 
>> If adding memory would fail completely, you'd see another "hot_add
>> memory failed error is ..." error message from hyper-v in the kernel
>> log. If that doesn't show up, it's simply suboptimal, but hotplugging
>> memory still succeeded.
> 
> I did notice that from the code in hv_balloon.c but I do not think I
> have ever seen that message in my logs.

Okay, so at least hotplugging memory is working.

-- 
Thanks,

David / dhildenb