Re: [PATCH v9 08/12] mm: zero reserved and unavailable struct pages

From: Pasha Tatashin
Date: Tue Oct 03 2017 - 11:30:57 EST


On 10/03/2017 09:18 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
On Wed 20-09-17 16:17:10, Pavel Tatashin wrote:
Some memory is reserved but unavailable: not present in memblock.memory
(because not backed by physical pages), but present in memblock.reserved.
Such memory has backing struct pages, but they are not initialized by going
through __init_single_page().

Could you be more specific where is such a memory reserved?


I know of one example: trim_low_memory_range() unconditionally reserves from pfn 0, but e820__memblock_setup() might provide the exiting memory from pfn 1 (i.e. KVM).

But, there could be more based on this comment from linux/page-flags.h:

19 * PG_reserved is set for special pages, which can never be swapped out. Some
20 * of them might not even exist (eg empty_bad_page)...

Pasha