Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH v2 2/2] spapr: Memory hot-unplug support

[Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>]

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On 29.04.2016 05:24, David Gibson wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 04:03:37PM -0500, Michael Roth wrote:
...
>> In the case of pseries, the DIMM abstraction isn't really exposed to
>> the guest, but rather the memory blocks we use to make the backing
>> memdev memory available to the guest. During unplug, the guest
>> completely releases these blocks back to QEMU, and if it can only
>> release a subset of what's requested it does not attempt to recover.
>> We can potentially change that behavior on the guest side, since
>> partially-freed DIMMs aren't currently useful on the host-side...
>>
>> But, in the case of pseries, I wonder if it makes sense to maybe go
>> ahead and MADV_DONTNEED the ranges backing these released blocks so the
>> host can at least partially reclaim the memory from a partially
>> unplugged DIMM?
> 
> Urgh.. I can see the benefit, but I'm a bit uneasy about making the
> DIMM semantics different in this way on Power.
> 
> I'm shoehorning the PAPR DR memory mechanism into the qemu DIMM model
> was a good idea after all.

Ignorant question (sorry, I really don't have much experience yet here):
Could we maybe align the size of the LMBs with the size of the DIMMs?
E.g. make the LMBs bigger or the DIMMs smaller, so that they match?

 Thomas



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