Re: [PATCH] mm: setup pageblock_order before it's used by sparse

[Mel Gorman]

On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 05:07:54PM +0800, Jiang Liu wrote:
> From: Xishi Qiu <qiuxishi@xxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> On architectures with CONFIG_HUGETLB_PAGE_SIZE_VARIABLE set, such as Itanium,
> pageblock_order is a variable with default value of 0. It's set to the right
> value by set_pageblock_order() in function free_area_init_core().
> 
> But pageblock_order may be used by sparse_init() before free_area_init_core()
> is called along path:
> sparse_init()
>     ->sparse_early_usemaps_alloc_node()
> 	->usemap_size()
> 	    ->SECTION_BLOCKFLAGS_BITS
> 		->((1UL << (PFN_SECTION_SHIFT - pageblock_order)) *
> NR_PAGEBLOCK_BITS)
> 
> The uninitialized pageblock_size will cause memory wasting because usemap_size()
> returns a much bigger value then it's really needed.
> 
> For example, on an Itanium platform,
> sparse_init() pageblock_order=0 usemap_size=24576
> free_area_init_core() before pageblock_order=0, usemap_size=24576
> free_area_init_core() after pageblock_order=12, usemap_size=8
> 
> That means 24K memory has been wasted for each section, so fix it by calling
> set_pageblock_order() from sparse_init().
> 
> Signed-off-by: Xishi Qiu <qiuxishi@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Jiang Liu <liuj97@xxxxxxxxx>

Looks all right.

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>

This should be considered a stable candidate. Add

Cc: stable <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

above your Signed-off-by and it'll get picked up if the patch is merged
to mainline.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
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