Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] support for broken memory modules (BadRAM)

[Andrew Morton]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:18:51 +0200 Stefan Assmann <sassmann@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Following the RFC for the BadRAM feature here's the updated version with
> spelling fixes, thanks go to Randy Dunlap. Also the code is now less verbose,
> as requested by Andi Kleen.
> v2 with even more spelling fixes suggested by Randy.
> Patches are against vanilla 2.6.39.
> 
> The idea is to allow the user to specify RAM addresses that shouldn't be
> touched by the OS, because they are broken in some way. Not all machines have
> hardware support for hwpoison, ECC RAM, etc, so here's a solution that allows to
> use bitmasks to mask address patterns with the new "badram" kernel command line
> parameter.
> Memtest86 has an option to generate these patterns since v2.3 so the only thing
> for the user to do should be:
> - run Memtest86
> - note down the pattern
> - add badram=<pattern> to the kernel command line
> 
> The concerning pages are then marked with the hwpoison flag and thus won't be
> used by the memory managment system.

The google kernel has a similar capability.  I asked Nancy to comment
on these patches and she said:

: One, the bad addresses are passed via the kernel command line, which
: has a limited length.  It's okay if the addresses can be fit into a
: pattern, but that's not necessarily the case in the google kernel.  And
: even with patterns, the limit on the command line length limits the
: number of patterns that user can specify.  Instead we use lilo to pass
: a file containing the bad pages in e820 format to the kernel.
: 
: Second, the BadRAM patch expands the address patterns from the command
: line into individual entries in the kernel's e820 table.  The e820
: table is a fixed buffer that supports a very small, hard coded number
: of entries (128).  We require a much larger number of entries (on
: the order of a few thousand), so much of the google kernel patch deals
: with expanding the e820 table. Also, with the BadRAM patch, entries
: that don't fit in the table are silently dropped and this isn't
: appropriate for us.
: 
: Another caveat of mapping out too much bad memory in general.  If too
: much memory is removed from low memory, a system may not boot.  We
: solve this by generating good maps.  Our userspace tools do not map out
: memory below a certain limit, and it verifies against a system's iomap
: that only addresses from memory is mapped out.

I have a couple of thoughts here:

- If this patchset is merged and a major user such as google is
  unable to use it and has to continue to carry a separate patch then
  that's a regrettable situation for the upstream kernel.

- Google's is, afaik, the largest use case we know of: zillions of
  machines for a number of years.  And this real-world experience tells
  us that the badram patchset has shortcomings.  Shortcomings which we
  can expect other users to experience.

So.  What are your thoughts on these issues?

Thanks
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