Re: [PATCH] arm64: configurable sparsemem section size

[Michal Hocko]

On Thu 25-04-19 16:31:38, Will Deacon wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 05:25:50PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Tue 23-04-19 16:38:43, Pavel Tatashin wrote:
> > > sparsemem section size determines the maximum size and alignment that
> > > is allowed to offline/online memory block. The bigger the size the less
> > > the clutter in /sys/devices/system/memory/*. On the other hand, however,
> > > there is less flexability in what granules of memory can be added and
> > > removed.
> > > 
> > > Recently, it was enabled in Linux to hotadd persistent memory that
> > > can be either real NV device, or reserved from regular System RAM
> > > and has identity of devdax.
> > > 
> > > The problem is that because ARM64's section size is 1G, and devdax must
> > > have 2M label section, the first 1G is always missed when device is
> > > attached, because it is not 1G aligned.
> > > 
> > > Allow, better flexibility by making section size configurable.
> > 
> > Is there any inherent reason (64k page size?) that enforces such a large
> > memsection?
> 
> I gave *vague* memories of running out of bits in the page flags if we
> changed this, but that was a while back. If that's no longer the case,
> then I'm open to changing the value, but I really don't want to expose
> it as a Kconfig option as proposed in this patch. People won't have a
> clue what to set and it doesn't help at all with the single-Image effort.

Ohh, I absolutely agree about the config option part JFTR. 1GB section
loos quite excessive. I am not really sure a standard arm64 memory
layout looks though.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs