Re: [RFC PATCH 00/12] mm: mirrored memory support for page buddy allocations

[Xishi Qiu <qiuxishi@huawei.com>]

On 2015/6/19 4:33, Luck, Tony wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 11:55:42AM +0200, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
>>>>> If there are many mirror regions in one node, then it will be many holes in the
>>>>> normal zone, is this fine?
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, it doesn't matter how many holes there are.
>>>
>>> So mirror zone and normal zone will span each other, right?
>>>
>>> e.g. node 1: 4G-8G(normal), 8-12G(mirror), 12-16G(normal), 16-24G(mirror), 24-28G(normal) ...
>>> normal: start=4G, size=28-4=24G,
>>> mirror: start=8G, size=24-8=16G,
>>
>> Yes, that works. It's somewhat unfortunate wrt performance that the hardware
>> does it like this though.
> 
> With current Xeon h/w you can have one mirrored range per memory
> controller ... and there are two memory controllers on a cpu socket,
> so two mirrored ranges per node.  So a map might look like:
> 
> SKT0: MC0: 0-2G Mirrored (but we may want to ignore mirror here to keep it for ZONE_DMA)
> SKT0: MC0: 2G-4G No memory ... I/O mapping area
> SKT0: MC0: 4G-34G Not mirrored
> SKT0: MC1: 34G-40G Mirrored
> SKT0: MC1: 40G-66G Not mirrored
> 
> SKT1: MC0: 66G-70G Mirror
> SKT1: MC0: 70G-98G Not Mirrored
> SKT1: MC1: 98G-102G Mirror
> SKT1: MC1: 102G-130G Not Mirrored
> 
> ... and so on.
> 
>>> I think zone is defined according to the special address range, like 16M(DMA), 4G(DMA32),
>>
>> Traditionally yes. But then there is ZONE_MOVABLE, this year's LSF/MM we
>> discussed (and didn't outright deny) ZONE_CMA...
>> I'm not saying others will favour the new zone approach though, it's just my
>> opinion that it might be a better option than a new migratetype.
> 
> If we are going to have lots of zones ... then perhaps we will
> need a fast way to look at a "struct page" and decide which zone
> it belongs to.  Complicated math on the address deosn't sound ideal.
> If the complex zone model is just for 64-bit, are there enough bits
> available in page->flags (3 bits for 8 options ... which we are close
> to filling now ... 4 bits for future breathing room).
> 
>>> and is it appropriate to add a new mirror zone with a volatile physical address?
>>
>> By "volatile" you mean what, that the example above would change
>> dynamically? That would be rather challenging...
> 
> If we hot-add another cpu together with on die memory controllers connected
> to more memory ... then some of the new memory might be mirrored.  Current
> h/w doesn't allow mirrored areas to grow/shrink (though if there are a lot
> of errors we may break a mirror so a whole range could lose the mirror attribute).
> 
> -Tony
> 

Hi Tony,

What's your suggestions? a new zone or a new migratetype?
Maybe add a new zone will change more mm code.

Thanks,
Xishi Qiu

> .
> 



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