Re: [PATCH 18/22] mm: mark DEVICE_PUBLIC as broken

Michal Hocko
2019-06-26T05:45:59Z

On Tue 25-06-19 20:15:28, John Hubbard wrote:
> On 6/19/19 12:27 PM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 06:23:04PM -0700, John Hubbard wrote:
> >> On 6/13/19 5:43 PM, Ira Weiny wrote:
> >>> On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 07:58:29PM +0000, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> >>>> On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 12:53:02PM -0700, Ralph Campbell wrote:
> >>>>>
> >> ...
> >>> So I think it is ok. Frankly I was wondering if we should remove the public
> >>> type altogether but conceptually it seems ok. But I don't see any users of it
> >>> so... should we get rid of it in the code rather than turning the config off?
> >>>
> >>> Ira
> >>
> >> That seems reasonable. I recall that the hope was for those IBM Power 9
> >> systems to use _PUBLIC, as they have hardware-based coherent device (GPU)
> >> memory, and so the memory really is visible to the CPU. And the IBM team
> >> was thinking of taking advantage of it. But I haven't seen anything on
> >> that front for a while.
> >
> > Does anyone know who those people are and can we encourage them to
> > send some patches? :)
> >
>
> I asked about this, and it seems that the idea was: DEVICE_PUBLIC was there
> in order to provide an alternative way to do things (such as migrate memory
> to and from a device), in case the combination of existing and near-future
> NUMA APIs was insufficient. This probably came as a follow-up to the early
> 2017-ish conversations about NUMA, in which the linux-mm recommendation was
> "try using HMM mechanisms, and if those are inadequate, then maybe we can
> look at enhancing NUMA so that it has better handling of advanced (GPU-like)
> devices".

Yes that was the original idea. It sounds so much better to use a common
framework rather than awkward special cased cpuless NUMA nodes with
a weird semantic. User of the neither of the two has shown up so I guess
that the envisioned HW just didn't materialized. Or has there been a
completely different approach chosen?

> In the end, however, _PUBLIC was never used, nor does anyone in the local
> (NVIDIA + IBM) kernel vicinity seem to have plans to use it. So it really
> does seem safe to remove, although of course it's good to start with
> BROKEN and see if anyone pops up and complains.

Well, I do not really see much of a difference. Preserving an unused
code which doesn't have any user in sight just adds a maintenance burden
whether the code depends on BROKEN or not. We can always revert patches
which remove the code once a real user shows up.
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs