Re: [PATCH] mm/hugetlb: avoid weird message in hugetlb_init

[Nitesh Narayan Lal]

On 4/15/20 12:03 AM, Mike Kravetz wrote:
> On 4/13/20 2:21 PM, Nitesh Narayan Lal wrote:
>> On 4/13/20 2:33 PM, Mike Kravetz wrote:
>>> On 4/10/20 8:47 AM, Nitesh Narayan Lal wrote:
>>>> Hi Mike,
>>>>
>>>> On platforms that support multiple huge page sizes when 'hugepagesz' is not
>>>> specified before 'hugepages=', hugepages are not allocated. (For example
>>>> if we are requesting 1GB hugepages)
>>> Hi Nitesh,
>>>
>>> This should only be an issue with gigantic huge pages.  This is because
>>> hugepages=X not following a hugepagesz=Y specifies the number of huge pages
>>> of default size to allocate.  It does not currently work for gigantic pages.
>> I see, since we changed the default hugepages to gigantic pages and we missed
>> 'hugepagesz=' no page were allocated of any type.
>>
>>> In the other thread, I provided this explanation as to why:
>>> It comes about because we do not definitively set the default huge page size
>>> until after command line processing (in hugetlb_init).  And, we must
>>> preallocate gigantic huge pages during command line processing because that
>>> is when the bootmem allocater is available.
>>>
>>> I will be looking into modifying this behavior to allocate the pages as
>>> expected, even for gigantic pages.
>> Nice, looking forward to it.
>>
>>>> In terms of reporting meminfo and /sys/kernel/../nr_hugepages reports the
>>>> expected results but if we use sysctl vm.nr_hugepages then it reports a non-zero
>>>> value as it reads the max_huge_pages from the default hstate instead of
>>>> nr_huge_pages.
>>>> AFAIK nr_huge_pages is the one that indicates the number of huge pages that are
>>>> successfully allocated.
>>>>
>>>> Does vm.nr_hugepages is expected to report the maximum number of hugepages? If
>>>> so, will it not make sense to rename the procname?
>>>>
>>>> However, if we expect nr_hugepages to report the number of successfully
>>>> allocated hugepages then we should use nr_huge_pages in
>>>> hugetlb_sysctl_handler_common().
>>> This looks like a bug.  Neither sysctl or the /proc file should be reporting
>>> a non-zero value if huge pages do not exist.
>> Yeap, as I mentioned it reports max_huge_pages instead of the nr_huge_pages.
> Does this only happen when you specify gigantic pages as the default huge
> page size and they are not allocated at boot time?

Yes.

>   Or, are there other
> situations where this happens?  If so, can you provide a sample of the
> boot parameters used, or how to recreate.

To reproduce this behavior boot the kernel with 'default_hugepagesz=1G
hugepages=8' parameter in the kernel cmdline, hugepagesz needs to be
skipped to ensure that no gigantic hugepages are allocated. After the
kernel is up check the output of 'sysctl vm.nr_hugepages'.
This should be good enough to reproduce this issue.

>
> I am fixing up the issue with gigantic pages, and suspect this will take
> are of all the issues you are seeing.  This will be part of the command line
> cleanup series.  Just want to make sure I am not missing something.
Makes sense. Thank you.

-- 
Nitesh

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