Re: [PATCH 1/4] x86_64: Switch to SPARSE_VIRTUAL

Dave Hansen
2007-04-02T19:55:05Z

On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 08:54 -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > BTW there is no guarantee the node size is a multiple of 128MB so
> > you likely need to handle the overlap case. Otherwise we can
> > get cache corruptions
>
> How does sparsemem handle that?

It doesn't. :)

In practice, this situation never happens because we don't have any
actual architectures that have any node boundaries on less than
MAX_ORDER, and the section size is at least MAX_ORDER. If we *did* have
this, then the page allocator would already be broken for these
nodes. ;)

So, this SPARSE_VIRTUAL does introduce a new dependency, which Andi
calculated above. But, in reality, I don't think it's a big deal. Just
to spell it out a bit more, if this:

VMEMMAP_MAPPING_SIZE/sizeof(struct page) * PAGE_SIZE

(where VMEMMAP_MAPPING_SIZE is PMD_SIZE in your case) is any larger than
the granularity on which your NUMA nodes are divided, then you might
have a problem with mem_map for one NUMA node getting allocated on
another.

It might be worth a comment, or at least some kind of WARN_ON().
Perhaps we can stick something in online_page() to check if:

page_to_nid(page) == page_to_nid(virt_to_page(page))

-- Dave