Re: [PATCH v7 2/8] x86/crash: Introduce new options to support cpu and memory hotplug

[Sourabh Jain]

On 26/04/22 20:09, Eric DeVolder wrote:
> On 4/25/22 23:21, Sourabh Jain wrote:
> > On 13/04/22 22:12, Eric DeVolder wrote:
> > > CRASH_HOTPLUG is to enable cpu and memory hotplug support of crash.
> > >
> > > CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ is used to specify the maximum size of
> > > the elfcorehdr buffer/segment.
> > >
> > > This is a preparation for later usage.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Eric DeVolder <eric.devolder@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > > Acked-by: Baoquan He <bhe@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > > ---
> > >   arch/x86/Kconfig | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> > >   1 file changed, 26 insertions(+)
> > >
> > > diff --git a/arch/x86/Kconfig b/arch/x86/Kconfig
> > > index b0142e01002e..f7b92ee1bcc7 100644
> > > --- a/arch/x86/Kconfig
> > > +++ b/arch/x86/Kconfig
> > > @@ -2072,6 +2072,32 @@ config CRASH_DUMP
> > >         (CONFIG_RELOCATABLE=y).
> > >         For more details see Documentation/admin-guide/kdump/kdump.rst
> > > +config CRASH_HOTPLUG
> > > +    bool "kernel updates of crash elfcorehdr"
> > > +    depends on CRASH_DUMP && (HOTPLUG_CPU || MEMORY_HOTPLUG) && 
> > > KEXEC_FILE
> > > +    help
> > > +      Enable the kernel to update the crash elfcorehdr (which contains
> > > +      the list of CPUs and memory regions) directly when hot 
> > > plug/unplug
> > > +      of CPUs or memory. Otherwise userspace must monitor these hot
> > > +      plug/unplug change notifications via udev in order to
> > > +      unload-then-reload the crash kernel so that the list of CPUs and
> > > +      memory regions is kept up-to-date. Note that the udev CPU and
> > > +      memory change notifications still occur (however, userspace 
> > > is not
> > > +      required to monitor for crash dump purposes).
> > > +
> > > +config CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ
> > > +    depends on CRASH_HOTPLUG
> > > +    int
> > > +    default 131072
> > > +    help
> > > +      Specify the maximum size of the elfcorehdr buffer/segment.
> > > +      The 128KiB default is sized so that it can accommodate 2048
> > > +      Elf64_Phdr, where each Phdr represents either a CPU or a
> > > +      region of memory.
> > > +      For example, this size can accommodate a machine with up to 1024
> > > +      CPUs and up to 1024 memory regions, eg. as represented by the
> > > +      'System RAM' entries in /proc/iomem.
> >
> > Is it possible to get rid of CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ?
> At the moment, I do not think so. The idea behind this value is to 
> represent the largest number of CPUs and memory regions possible in 
> the system. Today there is NR_CPUS which could be used for CPUs, but 
> there isn't a similar value for memory. I also am not aware of a 
> kernel variable that could be utilized to represent the maximum number 
> of memory regions. If there is, please let me know!
> > How about finding the additional buffer space needed for future CPU 
> > and memory
> > add during the kdump load? Not sure about the feasibility of doing 
> > this in
> > kexec tool (userspace).
>
> I may not understand what you are asking, but the x86 code, for 
> kexec_file_load, does in fact allocate all the space needed (currently 
> via CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ) upon kdump load.
>
> For kexec_load, I've had no problem asking the kexec tool to allocate 
> a larger piece of memory for the elfcorehdr. But it is the same 
> problem as CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ; how big? In my workspace I 
> tell kexec tool how big. If there are sysfs visible values for NR_CPU 
> and memory, then we could have kexec pull those and compute.

Yeah dynamic calculation for PT_LOAD sections needed for possible memory 
may not be straightforward. But still I did not get the rational for 
limiting the possible PT_LOAD sections or memory ranges to only 1024. 
Although in kexec tool the max memory ranges for x86 is 32K.

commit 1bc7bc7649fa29d95c98f6a6d8dd2f08734a865c
Author: David Hildenbrand <david@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date:   Tue Mar 23 11:01:10 2021 +0100

    crashdump/x86: increase CRASH_MAX_MEMORY_RANGES to 32k

    virtio-mem in Linux adds/removes individual memory blocks (e.g., 128 MB
    each). Linux merges adjacent memory blocks added by virtio-mem 
devices, but
    we can still end up with a very sparse memory layout when unplugging
    memory in corner cases.

    Let's increase the maximum number of crash memory ranges from ~2k 
to 32k.
    32k should be sufficient for a very long time.

    e_phnum field in the header is 16 bits wide, so we can fit a maximum of
    ~64k entries in there, shared with other entries (i.e., CPU). 
Therefore,
    using up to 32k memory ranges is fine. (if we ever need more than ~64k,

Do you see any issue if we increase the memory range count to 32K?

Thanks,
Sourabh Jain