Re: [PATCH v2 2/9] mm/vmstat: show start_pfn when zone spans pages

[David Hildenbrand]

On 01.10.22 03:28, Doug Berger wrote:
> On 9/29/2022 1:15 AM, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > On 29.09.22 00:32, Doug Berger wrote:
> > > A zone that overlaps with another zone may span a range of pages
> > > that are not present. In this case, displaying the start_pfn of
> > > the zone allows the zone page range to be identified.
> >
> > I don't understand the intention here.
> >
> > "/* If unpopulated, no other information is useful */"
> >
> > Why would the start pfn be of any use here?
> >
> > What is the user visible impact without that change?
> Yes, this is very subtle. I only caught it while testing some
> pathological cases.
>
> If you take the example system:
> The 7278 device has four ARMv8 CPU cores in an SMP cluster and two
> memory controllers (MEMCs). Each MEMC is capable of controlling up to
> 8GB of DRAM. An example 7278 system might have 1GB on each controller,
> so an arm64 kernel might see 1GB on MEMC0 at 0x40000000-0x7FFFFFFF and
> 1GB on MEMC1 at 0x300000000-0x33FFFFFFF.

Okay, thanks. You should make it clearer in the patch description -- 
especially how this relates to DMB. Having that said, I still have to 
digest your examples:

> Placing a DMB on MEMC0 with 'movablecore=256M@0x70000000' will lead to
> the ZONE_MOVABLE zone spanning from 0x70000000-0x33fffffff and the
> ZONE_NORMAL zone spanning from 0x300000000-0x33fffffff.

Why is ZONE_MOVABLE spanning more than 256M? It should span

0x70000000-0x80000000

Or what am I missing?

> If instead you specified 'movablecore=256M@0x70000000,512M' you would
> get the same ZONE_MOVABLE span, but the ZONE_NORMAL would now span
> 0x300000000-0x32fffffff. The requested 512M of movablecore would be
> divided into a 256MB DMB at 0x70000000 and a 256MB "classic" movable
> zone start would be displayed in the bootlog as:
> [    0.000000] Movable zone start for each node
> [    0.000000]   Node 0: 0x000000330000000


Okay, so that's the movable zone range excluding DMB.

> Finally, if you specified the pathological
> 'movablecore=256M@0x70000000,1G@12G' you would still have the same
> ZONE_MOVABLE span, and the ZONE_NORMAL span would go back to
> 0x300000000-0x33fffffff. However, because the second DMB (1G@12G)
> completely overlaps the ZONE_NORMAL there would be no pages present in
> ZONE_NORMAL and /proc/zoneinfo would report ZONE_NORMAL 'spanned
> 262144', but not where those pages are. This commit adds the 'start_pfn'
> back to the /proc/zoneinfo for ZONE_NORMAL so the span has context.

... but why? If there are no pages present, there is no ZONE_NORMAL we 
care about. The zone span should be 0. Does this maybe rather indicate 
that there is a zone span processing issue in your DMB implementation?

Special-casing zones based on DMBs feels wrong. But most probably I am 
missing something important :)

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb