Re: [PATCH v1 2/3] mm/memory_hotplug: initialize memmap of !ZONE_DEVICE with PageOffline() instead of PageReserved()

[Oscar Salvador]

On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 10:56:02AM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> There are fortunately not that many left.
> 
> I'd even say marking them (vmemmap) reserved is more wrong than right: note
> that ordinary vmemmap pages after memory hotplug are not reserved! Only
> bootmem should be reserved.

Ok, that is a very good point that I missed.
I thought that hotplugged-vmemmap pages (not selfhosted) were marked as
Reserved, that is why I thought this would be inconsistent.
But then, if that is the case, I think we are safe as kernel can already
encounter vmemmap pages that are not reserved and it deals with them
somehow.

> Let's take at the relevant core-mm ones (arch stuff is mostly just for MMIO
> remapping)
> 
... 
> Any PageReserved user that I am missing, or why we should handle these
> vmemmap pages differently than the ones allocated during ordinary memory
> hotplug?

No, I cannot think of a reason why normal vmemmap pages should behave
different than self-hosted.

I was also confused because I thought that after this change
pfn_to_online_page() would be different for self-hosted vmemmap pages,
because I thought that somehow we relied on PageOffline(), but it is not
the case.

> In the future, we might want to consider using a dedicated page type for
> them, so we can stop using a bit that doesn't allow to reliably identify
> them. (we should mark all vmemmap with that type then)

Yes, a all-vmemmap pages type would be a good thing, so we do not have
to special case.

Just one last thing.
Now self-hosted vmemmap pages will have the PageOffline cleared, and that
will still remain after the memory-block they belong to has gone
offline, which is ok because those vmemmap pages lay around until the
chunk of memory gets removed.

Ok, just wanted to convince myself that there will no be surprises.

Thanks David for claryfing.
 

-- 
Oscar Salvador
SUSE Labs