Re: [PATCH v3 1/2] mm/sparse: add sparse_init_nid()

[Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>]

On 07/01/18 at 10:43pm, Pavel Tatashin wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 1, 2018 at 10:31 PM Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 07/01/18 at 10:18pm, Pavel Tatashin wrote:
> > > > Here, I think it might be not right to jump to 'failed' directly if one
> > > > section of the node failed to populate memmap. I think the original code
> > > > is only skipping the section which memmap failed to populate by marking
> > > > it as not present with "ms->section_mem_map = 0".
> > > >
> > >
> > > Hi Baoquan,
> > >
> > > Thank you for a careful review. This is an intended change compared to
> > > the original code. Because we operate per-node now, if we fail to
> > > allocate a single section, in this node, it means we also will fail to
> > > allocate all the consequent sections in the same node and no need to
> > > check them anymore. In the original code we could not simply bailout,
> > > because we still might have valid entries in the following nodes.
> > > Similarly, sparse_init() will call sparse_init_nid() for the next node
> > > even if previous node failed to setup all the memory.
> >
> > Hmm, say the node we are handling is node5, and there are 100 sections.
> > If you allocate memmap for section at one time, you have succeeded to
> > handle for the first 99 sections, now the 100th failed, so you will mark
> > all sections on node5 as not present. And the allocation failure is only
> > for single section memmap allocation case.
> 
> No, unless I am missing something, that's not how code works:
> 
> 463                 if (!map) {
> 464                         pr_err("%s: memory map backing failed.
> Some memory will not be available.",
> 465                                __func__);
> 466                         pnum_begin = pnum;
> 467                         goto failed;
> 468                 }
> 
> 476 failed:
> 477         /* We failed to allocate, mark all the following pnums as
> not present */
> 478         for_each_present_section_nr(pnum_begin, pnum) {
> 
> We continue from the pnum that failed as we set pnum_begin to pnum,
> and mark all the consequent sections as not-present.

Ah, yes, I misunderstood it, sorry for that.

Then I have only one concern, for vmemmap case, if one section doesn't
succeed to populate its memmap, do we need to skip all the remaining
sections in that node?

> 
> The only change compared to the original code is that once we found an
> empty pnum we stop checking the consequent pnums in this node, as we
> know they are empty as well, because there is no more memory in this
> node to allocate from.
>