Re: [PATCH] Fix boot problem in situations where the boot CPU is running on a memoryless node

Pekka Enberg
2008-01-23T21:03:08Z

Hi,

On Jan 23, 2008 9:52 PM, Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> On at least one of the machines in question, wasn't it the case that
> node 0 had all the memory and node 1 had all the CPUs? In that case, you
> would have to boot off a memoryless node? And as long as that is a
> physically valid configuration, the kernel should handle it.

Agreed. Here's the patch that should fix it:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/1/23/332

On Jan 23, 2008 9:52 PM, Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> I bet we didn't notice this breaking because SLUB became the default and
> SLAB isn't on in the test.kernel.org testing, for instance. Perhaps we
> should add a second set of runs for some of the boxes there to run with
> CONFIG_SLAB on?

Sure.

On Jan 23, 2008 9:52 PM, Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> I'm curious if we know, for sure, of a kernel with CONFIG_SLAB=y that
> has booted all of the boxes reporting issues? That is, did they all work
> with 2.6.23?

I think Mel said that their configuration did work with 2.6.23
although I also wonder how that's possible. AFAIK there has been some
changes in the page allocator that might explain this. That is, if
kmem_getpages() returned pages for memoryless node before, bootstrap
would have worked.

Pekka