Re: [PATCH v5 3/3] mm/page_alloc: Keep memoryless cpuless node 0 offline

From: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
To: Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>,
	Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>,
	"Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>,
	Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>,
	Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	Gautham R Shenoy <ego@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Satheesh Rajendran <sathnaga@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 3/3] mm/page_alloc: Keep memoryless cpuless node 0 offline
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2020 13:06:01 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <0468f965-8762-76a3-93de-3987cf859927@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200701110145.GC17918@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

On 01.07.20 13:01, Srikar Dronamraju wrote:
> * David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> [2020-07-01 12:15:54]:
> 
>> On 01.07.20 12:04, Srikar Dronamraju wrote:
>>> * Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> [2020-07-01 10:42:00]:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 2. Also existence of dummy node also leads to inconsistent information. The
>>>>> number of online nodes is inconsistent with the information in the
>>>>> device-tree and resource-dump
>>>>>
>>>>> 3. When the dummy node is present, single node non-Numa systems end up showing
>>>>> up as NUMA systems and numa_balancing gets enabled. This will mean we take
>>>>> the hit from the unnecessary numa hinting faults.
>>>>
>>>> I have to say that I dislike the node online/offline state and directly
>>>> exporting that to the userspace. Users should only care whether the node
>>>> has memory/cpus. Numa nodes can be online without any memory. Just
>>>> offline all the present memory blocks but do not physically hot remove
>>>> them and you are in the same situation. If users are confused by an
>>>> output of tools like numactl -H then those could be updated and hide
>>>> nodes without any memory&cpus.
>>>>
>>>> The autonuma problem sounds interesting but again this patch doesn't
>>>> really solve the underlying problem because I strongly suspect that the
>>>> problem is still there when a numa node gets all its memory offline as
>>>> mentioned above.
>>>>
>>>> While I completely agree that making node 0 special is wrong, I have
>>>> still hard time to review this very simply looking patch because all the
>>>> numa initialization is so spread around that this might just blow up
>>>> at unexpected places. IIRC we have discussed testing in the previous
>>>> version and David has provided a way to emulate these configurations
>>>> on x86. Did you manage to use those instruction for additional testing
>>>> on other than ppc architectures?
>>>>
>>>
>>> I have tried all the steps that David mentioned and reported back at
>>> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200511174731.GD1961@linux.vnet.ibm.com/t/#u
>>>
>>> As a summary, David's steps are still not creating a memoryless/cpuless on
>>> x86 VM.
>>
>> Now, that is wrong. You get a memoryless/cpuless node, which is *not
>> online*. Once you hotplug some memory, it will switch online. Once you
>> remove memory, it will switch back offline.
>>
> 
> Let me clarify, we are looking for a node 0 which is cpuless/memoryless at
> boot.  The code in question tries to handle a cpuless/memoryless node 0 at
> boot.

I was just correcting your statement, because it was wrong.

Could be that x86 code maps PXM 1 to node 0 because PXM 1 does neither
have CPUs nor memory. That would imply that we can, in fact, never have
node 0 offline during boot.

-- 
Thanks,

David / dhildenb