Re: [RFC PATCH 00/29] mm: remove bootmem allocator

Mike Rapoport
2018-09-06T13:21:26Z

On Thu, Sep 06, 2018 at 01:04:47PM +0000, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
>
>
> On 9/6/18 5:15 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Wed 05-09-18 18:59:15, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> > [...]
> >> 325 files changed, 846 insertions(+), 2478 deletions(-)
> >> delete mode 100644 include/linux/bootmem.h
> >> delete mode 100644 mm/bootmem.c
> >> delete mode 100644 mm/nobootmem.c
> >
> > This is really impressive! Thanks a lot for working on this. I wish we
> > could simplify the memblock API as well. There are just too many public
> > functions with subtly different semantic and barely any useful
> > documentation.
> >
> > But even this is a great step forward!
>
> This is a great simplification of boot process. Thank you Mike!
>
> I agree, with Michal in the future, once nobootmem kernel stabalizes
> after this effort, we should start simplifying memblock allocator API:
> it won't be as big effort as this one, as I think, that can be done in
> incremental phases, but it will help to make early boot much more stable
> and uniform across arches.

It's not only about the memblock APIs. Every arch has its own way of memory
detection and initialization, all this should be revisited at some point.
But yes, apart from the memblock APIs update which will be quite
disruptive, the arches memory initialization can be updated incrementally.

> Thank you,
> Pavel

--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.