[PATCH V3 2/2] mm/memblock: Add support for excluded memory areas

[PATCH V3 2/2] mm/memblock: Add support for excluded memory areas

[Strashko, Grygorii]

Hi Philipp,

On 01/14/2014 08:52 PM, Philipp Hachtmann wrote:
> Hello Grygorii,
> 
> thank you for your comments.
> 
> To clarify we have the following requirements for memblock:
> 
> (1) Reserved areas can be declared before memory is added.
> (2) The physical memory is detected once only.
> (3) The free memory (i.e. not reserved) memory can be iterated to add
> it to the buddy allocator.
> (4) Memory designated to be mapped into the kernel address space can be
> iterated.
> (5) Kdump on s390 requires knowledge about the full system memory
> layout.
> 
> The s390 kdump implementation works a bit different from the
> implementation on other architectures: The layout is not taken from the
> production system and saved for the kdump kernel. Instead the kdump
> kernel needs to gather information about the whole memory without
> respect to locked out areas (like mem= and OLDMEM etc.).
> 
> Without kdump's requirement it would of course be suitable and easy
> just to remove memory from memblock.memory. But then this information
> is lost for later use by kdump.
> 
> The patch does not change any behaviour of the current API - whether it
> is enabled or not.

Sorry, for the delayed reply.

My main concern here was that you are introducing new *generic* API,
but in fact it is not generic, because it can't be re-used without huge rework
of existing code.
(at least as of wide usage of for_each_memblock(memory,...),
because (if ARCH_MEMBLOCK_NOMAP=y) the meaning of "memory"
ranges will be changed form "mapped memory" to "real phys memory").

And therefore, I've proposed to keep things as is and introduce phys_memory
ranges instead, to store real phys memory configuration.

> 
> The current patch seems to be overly complicated.
> The following patch contains only the nomap functionality without any
> cleanup and refactoring. I will post a V4 patch set which will contain
> this patch.

Regards,
-grygorii

[PATCH V3 2/2] mm/memblock: Add support for excluded memory areas

[Philipp Hachtmann]

Am Fri, 17 Jan 2014 18:08:13 +0000
schrieb "Strashko, Grygorii" <grygorii.strashko@ti.com>:

Hello Grygorii,

> > The current patch seems to be overly complicated.
> > The following patch contains only the nomap functionality without
> > any cleanup and refactoring. I will post a V4 patch set which will
> > contain this patch.

please see the V4 patch set I've sent to the list. There you will
clearly see that nothing is changed. No API is broken by the patch.
The patch only adds functionality.
Everything that worked before keeps working as before without any
changes needed in any arch's code.

Kind regards

Philipp