Re: [v6 05/15] mm: don't accessed uninitialized struct pages

Pasha Tatashin
2017-08-17T15:29:55Z

Hi Michal,

I've been looking through this code again, and I think your suggestion
will work. I did not realize this iterator already exist:

for_each_free_mem_range() basically iterates through (memory && !reserved)

This is exactly what we need here. So, I will update this patch to use
this iterator, which will simplify it.

Pasha

On 08/14/2017 09:51 AM, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
>>> mem_init()
>>> free_all_bootmem()
>>> free_low_memory_core_early()
>>> for_each_reserved_mem_region()
>>> reserve_bootmem_region()
>>> init_reserved_page() <- if this is deferred reserved page
>>> __init_single_pfn()
>>> __init_single_page()
>>>
>>> So, currently, we are using the value of page->flags to figure out if
>>> this
>>> page has been initialized while being part of deferred page, but this
>>> is not
>>> going to work for this project, as we do not zero the memory that is
>>> backing
>>> the struct pages, and size the value of page->flags can be anything.
>>
>> True, this is the initialization part I've missed in one of the previous
>> patches already. Would it be possible to only iterate over !reserved
>> memory blocks instead? Now that we discard all the metadata later it
>> should be quite easy to do for_each_memblock_type, no?
>
> Hi Michal,
>
> Clever suggestion to add a new iterator to go through unreserved
> existing memory, I do not think there is this iterator available, so it
> would need to be implemented, using similar approach to what I have done
> with a call back.
>
> However, there is a different reason, why I took this current approach.
>
> Daniel Jordan is working on a ktask support:
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/7/14/666
>
> He and I discussed on how to multi-thread struct pages initialization
> within memory nodes using ktasks. Having this callback interface makes
> that multi-threading quiet easy, improving the boot performance further,
> with his prototype we saw x4-6 improvements (using 4-8 threads per
> node). Reducing the total time it takes to initialize all struct pages
> on machines with terabytes of memory to less than one second.
>
> Pasha