Re: Linux MM Alignment Session on hwpoison (was: Re: [PATCH v6 0/5] Only free healthy pages in high-order has_hwpoisoned folio)

[David Rientjes]

On Fri, 28 Aug 2026, David Rientjes wrote:

> Following up on this thread and the suggestion from Matthew (thank you!), 
> I think it would be useful to have a hwpoison requirements and roadmap 
> discussion on how its support is currently integrated into the core MM, 
> get an understanding of what the areas to improve are, and get a sense of 
> future work in this area that people are planning.
> 
> This particular patch series is addressing an area of interest to Google, 
> but it's also quite clear from the thread that there are multiple areas to 
> improve for hwpoison in the core MM and it wouldn't hurt to get more 
> insight into what dependencies users have on it.
> 
> I'd propose this for discussion in one of our upcoming Linux MM Alignment 
> Sessions: Wednesday, September 16 9-10am PDT (UTC-7).
> 
> No specific agenda other than to gather core MM developers with hwpoison 
> developers and discuss:
>  - where validation should live, esp with regard to the page allocator, or
>    strict invariants in the page allocator
>    + implications for the fastpath
>  - handling for folios of arbitary orders
>  - handling partial folio poisoning and split failures
>  - race conditions between memory_failure() and concurrent
>    alloc/free/compaction
>  - soft offline for pages in the pcp lists
> 
> We might even want to be bold and discuss a holistic design overhaul if 
> it's warranted.
> 
> I'll invite those on this email thread and anybody else is welcome to 
> attend as well, the announcement email goes out two days ahead of time to 
> linux-mm@xxxxxxxxx.
> 
> If the time just doesn't work for somebody who needs to attend, please 
> reach out to me separately and we can discuss other times.
> 

Due to a couple of conflicts that people have, we'll suggest doing this at 
a special time: Wednesday, September 23 9-10am PDT (UTC-7).

Please email me privately if you're essential for the dicussion and can't 
make this time.  Thank you!