non-contiguous physical memory

non-contiguous physical memory

[Yaron Presente]

Hi all,
I'm running montavista linux (2.4.18_mvl30-malta-mips_fp_le) on a board 
that has 2 memory banks of physical memory.
1. 32MB from physical address 0x00000000
2. 16MB from physical address 0x20000000

Currently I can only access the first bank (by add_memory_region(0, 32 
<< 20, BOOT_MEM_RAM) in prom_init() ).
I tried the obvious solution of adding another region at 0x20000000 
(add_memory_region(0x20000000, 16 << 20, BOOT_MEM_RAM))
but that didn't seem to work. I've also tried to add a BOOT_MEM_RESERVED 
region in between the regions in order to create a seemingly contiguous 
memory, with no success.
My questions are:
Is it possible to access the second bank as well under MIPS ?
Is there a way to define a "hole" in the physical memory?
Do I have to use CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM ? is it fully supported ?
Thanks for your help,

-- 
Yaron Presente
MRV International
Direct   : 972-4-9936237
Fax      : 972-4-9890564
Email   : ypresente@mrv.com
www.mrv.com

Re: non-contiguous physical memory

[Ralf Baechle]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 03:46:43PM +0300, Yaron Presente wrote:

> I'm running montavista linux (2.4.18_mvl30-malta-mips_fp_le) on a board 
> that has 2 memory banks of physical memory.
> 1. 32MB from physical address 0x00000000
> 2. 16MB from physical address 0x20000000
> 
> Currently I can only access the first bank (by add_memory_region(0, 32 
> << 20, BOOT_MEM_RAM) in prom_init() ).
> I tried the obvious solution of adding another region at 0x20000000 
> (add_memory_region(0x20000000, 16 << 20, BOOT_MEM_RAM))
> but that didn't seem to work. I've also tried to add a BOOT_MEM_RESERVED 
> region in between the regions in order to create a seemingly contiguous 
> memory, with no success.
> My questions are:
> Is it possible to access the second bank as well under MIPS ?
> Is there a way to define a "hole" in the physical memory?
> Do I have to use CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM ? is it fully supported ?
> Thanks for your help,

Your initial approach was nearly right - you can solve the problem of
holes in the memory map as long as they're small enough by only adding
the available regions with add_memory_region().  Typically uses for
this are small holes due to memory in use by firmware, for example.

Now, in your case the whole isn't small.  In fact, with 480MB it's big ;-)
What Linux will try to do is to allocate the mem_map array for the
entire memory range from 0x0 - 0x21000000, that's 528MB.  mem_map contains
one page per 4k page; each entry is 64 bytes in size for 32-bit kernels
so that makes a total size for mem_map[] of 8.25MB of which just 768kB are
actually being used.

Just to make life a little bit more misserable memory 32-bit kernels can
only use memory above the 512MB boundary as highmem.

CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM can solve this problem - but Linux/MIPS really doesn't
much an attempt to make that easy to use.  Right now only a single MIPS
system is using CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM and that system is using it in
combination with CONFIG_NUMA which is quite an additional complication.

With CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM there will be no more mem_map[] array. Instead
there will be one such array for each memory region which means you'll
loose a bit of performance due to additional complexity but you'll save
all the wasted memory.

  Ralf

Re: non-contiguous physical memory

[Yaron Presente]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2887 bytes --]

Ralf,
Thanks for your help.
We've found out that the board can address more then 32MB in the lower 
bank, so for simplicity reasons,
I think that we just won't use the higher bank.
Yaron

Ralf Baechle wrote:

>On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 03:46:43PM +0300, Yaron Presente wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I'm running montavista linux (2.4.18_mvl30-malta-mips_fp_le) on a board 
>>that has 2 memory banks of physical memory.
>>1. 32MB from physical address 0x00000000
>>2. 16MB from physical address 0x20000000
>>
>>Currently I can only access the first bank (by add_memory_region(0, 32 
>><< 20, BOOT_MEM_RAM) in prom_init() ).
>>I tried the obvious solution of adding another region at 0x20000000 
>>(add_memory_region(0x20000000, 16 << 20, BOOT_MEM_RAM))
>>but that didn't seem to work. I've also tried to add a BOOT_MEM_RESERVED 
>>region in between the regions in order to create a seemingly contiguous 
>>memory, with no success.
>>My questions are:
>>Is it possible to access the second bank as well under MIPS ?
>>Is there a way to define a "hole" in the physical memory?
>>Do I have to use CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM ? is it fully supported ?
>>Thanks for your help,
>>    
>>
>
>Your initial approach was nearly right - you can solve the problem of
>holes in the memory map as long as they're small enough by only adding
>the available regions with add_memory_region().  Typically uses for
>this are small holes due to memory in use by firmware, for example.
>
>Now, in your case the whole isn't small.  In fact, with 480MB it's big ;-)
>What Linux will try to do is to allocate the mem_map array for the
>entire memory range from 0x0 - 0x21000000, that's 528MB.  mem_map contains
>one page per 4k page; each entry is 64 bytes in size for 32-bit kernels
>so that makes a total size for mem_map[] of 8.25MB of which just 768kB are
>actually being used.
>
>Just to make life a little bit more misserable memory 32-bit kernels can
>only use memory above the 512MB boundary as highmem.
>
>CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM can solve this problem - but Linux/MIPS really doesn't
>much an attempt to make that easy to use.  Right now only a single MIPS
>system is using CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM and that system is using it in
>combination with CONFIG_NUMA which is quite an additional complication.
>
>With CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM there will be no more mem_map[] array. Instead
>there will be one such array for each memory region which means you'll
>loose a bit of performance due to additional complexity but you'll save
>all the wasted memory.
>
>  Ralf
> This mail arrived via mail.mrv.com
>
> 
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>




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