Re: [PATCH v12 7/7] x86/crash: Add x86 crash hotplug support

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Wed Oct 26 2022 - 10:54:43 EST


On 26.10.22 16:48, Baoquan He wrote:
On 10/25/22 at 12:31pm, Borislav Petkov wrote:
On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 10:57:28AM +0800, Baoquan He wrote:
The concern to range number mainly is on Virt guest systems.

And why would virt emulate 1K hotpluggable DIMM slots and not emulate a
real machine?

IIRC, ACPI only allows for 256 slots. PPC dlpar might provide more.


Well, currently, mem hotpug is an important feature on virt system to
dynamically increase/shrink memory on the system. If only emulating real
machine, it won't be different than bare metal system.

IIRC, the ballon driver or virtio-mem feature can add memory board, e.g
1G, block size is 128M, 8 blocks added. When shrinking this 1G memory
later, it will take best effort way to hot remove memory. Means if any
memory block is occupied, it will be kept there. Finally we could only
remove every second blocks, 4 blocks altogether. Then the left
un-removed blocks will produce 4 separate memory regions. Like this, a
virt guest could have many memory regions in kernel after memory
being added/removed.

If I am wrong, Please correct me, David.

Yes, virtio-mem (but also PPC dlpar) can result in many individual memory blocks with holes in between after hotunplug. Hotplug OTOH, usually tries to "plug" these holes and reduce the total number of memory blocks. It might be rare that our range will be heavily fragmented after unplug, but it's certainly possible.

[...]


Yes, now assume we have a HPE SGI system and it has memory hotplug
capacity. The system itself has already got memory regions more than
1024. Then when we hot add extra memory board, we want to include the
newly added memory regions into elfcorehdr so that it will be dumped out
in kdump kernel.

That's why I earlier suggested 2048 for number of memory regions.

The more the better, unless "it hurts". Assuming a single memory block is 128 MiB, that would be 256 GiB.

Usually, on big systems, the memory block size is 2 GiB. So 4 TiB.

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb