Re: [PATCH v3] mm: make expand_downwards symmetrical to expand_upwards

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Tue, 2011-04-19 at 13:35 -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Apr 2011, James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> > > }
> > >
> > > How in the world did you get a zone setup in node 1 with a !NUMA config?
> >
> > I told you ... I forced an allocation into the first discontiguous
> > region.  That will return 1 for page_to_nid().
> 
> How? The kernel has no concept of a node 1 without CONFIG_NUMA and so you
> cannot tell the page allocator to allocate from node 1.

Yes, it does, as I explained in the email.

> zone_to_nid is used as a fallback mechanism for page_to_nid() and as shown
> will always return 0 for !NUMA configs.
> 
> page_to_nid(x) == zone_to_nid(page_zone(x)) must hold true. It is not
> here.
> 
> > > The problem seems to be that the kernel seems to allow a
> > > definition of a page_to_nid() function that returns non zero in the !NUMA
> > > case.
> >
> > This is called reality, yes.
> 
> There you have the bug. Fix that and things will work fine.

Why don't yout file the bug against reality? I'm not sure I have enough
credibility ...

> > right, that's what I told you: slub is broken because it's making a
> > wrong assumption.  Look in asm-generic/memory_model.h it shows how the
> > page_to_nid() is used in finding the pfn array.  DISCONTIGMEM uses some
> > of the numa properties (including assigning zones to the discontiguous
> > regions).
> 
> Bitrotted code?

Don't be silly: alpha, ia64, m32r, m68k, mips, parisc, tile and even x86
all use the discontigmem memory model in some configurations.

>  If it uses numa properties then it must use a zone field
> in struct zone. So DISCONTIGMEM seems to require CONFIG_NUMA.

No ... you're giving me back your assumptions.  They're not based on
what the kernel does.  CONFIG_NUMA may or may not be defined with
CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM.

Of all the above, only x86 always had NUMA with DISCONTIGMEM.

> > > If you think that is broken then we have brokenness all over the kernel
> > > whenever we determine the node from a page and use that to do a lookup.
> >
> > Not really.  The rest of the kernel uses the proper macros.  in
> > DISCONTIGMEM but !NUMA configs, the numa macros expand correctly.
> > You've cut across that with all the CONFIG_NUMA checks in slub.
> 
> What are "the proper macros"? AFAICT page_to_nid() is the proper way to
> access the node of a page. If page_to_nid() returns 1 then you have a zone
> that the kernel knows of as being in node 0 having a page on a different
> node.

Well it depends what you want.  If you only want the actual NUMA node,
then pfn_to_nid() probably isn't what you want, because in a
DISCONTIGMEM model, there may be multiple nids per actual numa node.

> We can likely force page_to_nid to ignore the node information that have
> been erroneously placed there but this looks like something deeper is
> wrong here. The node field in struct page is not only used for the Linux
> support of a NUMA node but also for blocks of memory. Those should be
> separate things.

Look, it's not wrong, it's by design.  The assumption that non-numa
systems don't use nodes is the wrong one.

> ---
>  include/linux/mm.h |    4 ++++
>  1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)
> 
> Index: linux-2.6/include/linux/mm.h
> ===================================================================
> --- linux-2.6.orig/include/linux/mm.h	2011-04-19 13:20:20.092521248 -0500
> +++ linux-2.6/include/linux/mm.h	2011-04-19 13:21:05.962521196 -0500
> @@ -665,6 +665,7 @@ static inline int zone_to_nid(struct zon
>  #endif
>  }
> 
> +#ifdef CONFIG_NUMA
>  #ifdef NODE_NOT_IN_PAGE_FLAGS
>  extern int page_to_nid(struct page *page);
>  #else
> @@ -673,6 +674,9 @@ static inline int page_to_nid(struct pag
>  	return (page->flags >> NODES_PGSHIFT) & NODES_MASK;
>  }
>  #endif
> +#else
> +#define page_to_nid(x) 0
> +#endif

Don't be silly ... that breaks asm-generic/memory_model.h

James


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