Re: DISCONTIGMEM is deprecated

Helge Deller
2019-04-19T20:09:01Z

On 19.04.19 16:28, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 07:05:21AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 10:43:35AM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
>>> DISCONTIG is essentially deprecated and even parisc plans to move to
>>> SPARSEMEM so there is no need to be fancy, this patch simply disables
>>> watermark boosting by default on DISCONTIGMEM.
>>
>> I don't think parisc is the only arch which uses DISCONTIGMEM for !NUMA
>> scenarios. Grepping the arch/ directories shows:
>>
>> alpha (does support NUMA, but also non-NUMA DISCONTIGMEM)
>> arc (for supporting more than 1GB of memory)
>> ia64 (looks complicated ...)
>> m68k (for multiple chunks of memory)
>> mips (does support NUMA but also non-NUMA)
>> parisc (both NUMA and non-NUMA)
>>
>> I'm not sure that these architecture maintainers even know that DISCONTIGMEM
>> is deprecated. Adding linux-arch to the cc.
>
> Poor wording then -- yes, DISCONTIGMEM is still used but look where it's
> used. I find it impossible to believe that any new arch would support
> DISCONTIGMEM or that DISCONTIGMEM would be selected when SPARSEMEM is
> available.`It's even more insane when you consider that SPARSEMEM can be
> extended to support VMEMMAP so that it has similar overhead to FLATMEM
> when mapping pfns to struct pages and vice-versa.

FYI, on parisc we will switch from DISCONTIGMEM to SPARSEMEM with kernel 5.2.
The patch was quite simple and it's currently in the for-next tree:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/deller/parisc-linux.git/commit/?h=for-next&id=281b718721a5e78288271d632731cea9697749f7

Helge