Re: [PATCH 2/3] mm: Introduce subsection_dev_map

[Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 12:40 PM David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> wrote:
[..]
> >>>> I'm still struggling to understand the motivation of distinguishing
> >>>> "active" as something distinct from "online". As long as the "online"
> >>>> granularity is improved from sections down to subsections then most
> >>>> code paths are good to go. The others can use get_devpagemap() to
> >>>> check for ZONE_DEVICE in a race free manner as they currently do.
> >>>
> >>> I thought we wanted to unify access if we don’t really care about the zone as in most pfn walkers - E.g., for zone shrinking.
> >>
> >> Agree, when the zone does not matter, which is most cases, then
> >> pfn_online() and pfn_valid() are sufficient.
>
> Oh, and just to clarify why I proposed pfn_active(): The issue right now is that a PFN that is valid but not online could be offline memory (memmap not initialized) or ZONE_DEVICE. That‘s why I wanted to have a way to detect if a memmap was initialized, independent of the zone. That‘s important for generic PFN walkers.

That's what I was debating with Toshiki [1], whether there is a real
example of needing to distinguish ZONE_DEVICE from offline memory in a
pfn walker. The proposed use case in this patch set of being able to
set hwpoison on ZONE_DEVICE pages does not seem like a good idea to
me. My suspicion is that this is a common theme and others are looking
to do these types page manipulations that only make sense for online
memory. If that is the case then treating ZONE_DEVICE as offline seems
the right direction.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/CAPcyv4joVDwiL21PPyJ7E_mMFR2SL3QTi09VMtfxb_W+-1p8vQ@mail.gmail.com/