mm/memblock: export memblock_{start/end}_of_DRAM

Sudarshan Rajagopalan
2020-10-29T21:29:33Z

Hello all,

We have a usecase where a module driver adds certain memory blocks using
add_memory_driver_managed(), so that it can perform memory hotplug
operations on these blocks. In general, these memory blocks aren’t
something that gets physically added later, but is part of actual RAM
that system booted up with. Meaning – we set the ‘mem=’ cmdline
parameter to limit the memory and later add the remaining ones using
add_memory*() variants.

The basic idea is to have driver have ownership and manage certain
memory blocks for hotplug operations.

For the driver be able to know how much memory was limited and how much
actually present, we take the delta of ‘bootmem physical end address’
and ‘memblock_end_of_DRAM’. The 'bootmem physical end address' is
obtained by scanning the reg values in ‘memory’ DT node and determining
the max {addr,size}. Since our driver is getting modularized, we won’t
have access to memblock_end_of_DRAM (i.e. end address of all memory
blocks after ‘mem=’ is applied).

So checking if memblock_{start/end}_of_DRAM() symbols can be exported?
Also, this information can be obtained by userspace by doing ‘cat
/proc/iomem’ and greping for ‘System RAM’. So wondering if userspace can
have access to such info, can we allow kernel module drivers have access
by exporting memblock_{start/end}_of_DRAM().

Or are there any other ways where a module driver can get the end
address of system memory block?

Sudarshan

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