Re: [GIT PULL] VFIO updates for v6.17-rc1

[David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>]

On 05.08.25 15:36, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Aug 2025 at 16:26, Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com> wrote:
>>
>> David, there is another alternative to prevent this, simple though a
>> bit wasteful, just allocate a bit bigger to ensure the allocation
>> doesn't end on an exact PAGE_SIZE boundary?
> 
> So I don't mind adding a check for "page_section()", because at least
> that makes sense.
> 
> But yes, it would also probably be a good idea to try to minimize
> SPARSEMEM without VMEMMAP. I'd love to get rid of it entirely, of
> course, but even if that isn't possible, I'd *really* just like people
> to try to make sure that it's neve ra valid thing to try to combine
> memory across different sections.
> 
> David mentioned the 1GB hugepage folios, and I really thought that
> even *those* were all in one section. They *should* be.

The memory section size on x86 is always 128 MiB. Even with SPARSEMEM.

There are weird interactions between memory section size and memory 
hotplug / DAX, so we try to keep it small'ish.

It's more that we don't care that much about memory section size with 
SPARSEMEM because nth_page() and everything around that is just plain 
simple.

> 
> Do we have any relevant architectures that still do SPARSEMEM without
> VMEMMAP? Because if it's purely some "legacy architecture" thing (ie
> x86-32), how about just saying "no 1GB hugepages for you".

arch/arm64/Kconfig:     select SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE
arch/loongarch/Kconfig: select SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE
arch/powerpc/Kconfig:   select SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE
arch/riscv/Kconfig:     select SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE if 64BIT
arch/s390/Kconfig:      select SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE
arch/sparc/Kconfig:     select SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE
arch/x86/Kconfig:       select SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE if X86_64

But SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP is still user-selectable.

I would assume SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE support would cover most hugetlb 
+ dax users indeed, at least when it comes to gigantic folios.

Would have to figure out why someone would want to disable it (limited 
vspace? but that should also not really be a problem on 64bit I think).

-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb