linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH RFC 01/35] mm: stop making SPARSEMEM

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Message-ID: <7169DDE5-A347-44F9-A6A1-707BF9A314F0@nvidia.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:20:48 -0400
From: Zi Yan <ziy@...dia.com>
To: David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Huacai Chen <chenhuacai@...nel.org>,
 WANG Xuerui <kernel@...0n.name>, Madhavan Srinivasan <maddy@...ux.ibm.com>,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 01/35] mm: stop making SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP
 user-selectable

On 21 Aug 2025, at 16:06, David Hildenbrand wrote:

> In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to deal with SPARSEMEM without
> SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP, but in particular for 32bit SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP is
> considered too costly and consequently not supported.
>
> However, if an architecture does support SPARSEMEM with
> SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP, let's forbid the user to disable VMEMMAP: just
> like we already do for arm64, s390 and x86.
>
> So if SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP is supported, don't allow to use SPARSEMEM without
> SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP.
>
> This implies that the option to not use SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP will now be
> gone for loongarch, powerpc, riscv and sparc. All architectures only
> enable SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP with 64bit support, so there should not really
> be a big downside to using the VMEMMAP (quite the contrary).
>
> This is a preparation for not supporting
>
> (1) folio sizes that exceed a single memory section
> (2) CMA allocations of non-contiguous page ranges
>
> in SPARSEMEM without SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP configs, whereby we
> want to limit possible impact as much as possible (e.g., gigantic hugetlb
> page allocations suddenly fails).

Sounds like a good idea.

>
> Cc: Huacai Chen <chenhuacai@...nel.org>
> Cc: WANG Xuerui <kernel@...0n.name>
> Cc: Madhavan Srinivasan <maddy@...ux.ibm.com>
> Cc: Michael Ellerman <mpe@...erman.id.au>
> Cc: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@...il.com>
> Cc: Christophe Leroy <christophe.leroy@...roup.eu>
> Cc: Paul Walmsley <paul.walmsley@...ive.com>
> Cc: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@...belt.com>
> Cc: Albert Ou <aou@...s.berkeley.edu>
> Cc: Alexandre Ghiti <alex@...ti.fr>
> Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>
> Cc: Andreas Larsson <andreas@...sler.com>
> Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand <david@...hat.com>
> ---
>  mm/Kconfig | 3 +--
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 2 deletions(-)
>

Acked-by: Zi Yan <ziy@...dia.com>

Best Regards,
Yan, Zi