Re: [PATCH v8 01/17] memblock: add MEMBLOCK_RSRV_KERN flag

Mike Rapoport
2025-11-06T08:24:40Z

Hello Breno,

On Wed, Nov 05, 2025 at 02:18:11AM -0800, Breno Leitao wrote:
> Hello Pratyush,
>
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2025 at 03:10:37PM +0200, Pratyush Yadav wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 14 2025, Breno Leitao wrote:
> > > On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 06:40:09PM +0200, Pratyush Yadav wrote:
> > >> On Mon, Oct 13 2025, Pratyush Yadav wrote:
> > >> >
> > >> > I suppose this would be useful. I think enabling memblock debug prints
> > >> > would also be helpful (using the "memblock=debug" commandline parameter)
> > >> > if it doesn't impact your production environment too much.
> > >>
> > >> Actually, I think "memblock=debug" is going to be the more useful thing
> > >> since it would also show what function allocated the overlapping range
> > >> and the flags it was allocated with.
> > >>
> > >> On my qemu VM with KVM, this results in around 70 prints from memblock.
> > >> So it adds a bit of extra prints but nothing that should be too
> > >> disrupting I think. Plus, only at boot so the worst thing you get is
> > >> slightly slower boot times.
> > >
> > > Unfortunately this issue is happening on production systems, and I don't
> > > have an easy way to reproduce it _yet_.
> > >
> > > At the same time, "memblock=debug" has two problems:
> > >
> > > 1) It slows the boot time as you suggested. Boot time at large
> > > environments is SUPER critical and time sensitive. It is a bit
> > > weird, but it is common for machines in production to kexec
> > > _thousands_ of times, and kexecing is considered downtime.
> >
> > I don't know if it would make a real enough difference on boot times,
> > only that it should theoretically affect it, mainly if you are using
> > serial for dmesg logs. Anyway, that's your production environment so you
> > know best.
> >
> > >
> > > This would be useful if I find some hosts getting this issue, and
> > > then I can easily enable the extra information to collect what
> > > I need, but, this didn't pan out because the hosts I got
> > > `memblock=debug` didn't collaborate.
> > >
> > > 2) "memblock=debug" is verbose for all cases, which also not necessary
> > > the desired behaviour. I am more interested in only being verbose
> > > when there is a known problem.
>
> I am still interested in this problem, and I finally found a host that
> constantly reproduce the issue and I was able to get `memblock=debug`
> cmdline. I am running 6.18-rc4 with some debug options enabled.
>
> DMA-API: exceeded 7 overlapping mappings of cacheline 0x0000000006d6e400
> WARNING: CPU: 58 PID: 828 at kernel/dma/debug.c:463 add_dma_entry+0x2e4/0x330
> pc : add_dma_entry+0x2e4/0x330
> lr : add_dma_entry+0x2e4/0x330
> sp : ffff8000b036f7f0
> x29: ffff8000b036f800 x28: 0000000000000001 x27: 0000000000000008
> x26: ffff8000835f7fb8 x25: ffff8000835f7000 x24: ffff8000835f7ee0
> x23: 0000000000000000 x22: 0000000006d6e400 x21: 0000000000000000
> x20: 0000000006d6e400 x19: ffff0003f70c1100 x18: 00000000ffffffff
> x17: ffff80008019a2d8 x16: ffff80008019a08c x15: 0000000000000000
> x14: 0000000000000000 x13: 0000000000000820 x12: ffff00011faeaf00
> x11: 0000000000000000 x10: ffff8000834633d8 x9 : ffff8000801979d4
> x8 : 00000000fffeffff x7 : ffff8000834633d8 x6 : 0000000000000000
> x5 : 00000000000bfff4 x4 : 0000000000000000 x3 : ffff0001075eb7c0
> x2 : 0000000000000000 x1 : 0000000000000000 x0 : ffff0001075eb7c0
> Call trace:
> add_dma_entry+0x2e4/0x330 (P)
> debug_dma_map_phys+0xc4/0xf0
> dma_map_phys (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/./include/linux/dma-direct.h:138 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/dma/direct.h:102 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/dma/mapping.c:169)
> dma_map_page_attrs (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/dma/mapping.c:387)
> blk_dma_map_direct.isra.0 (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/block/blk-mq-dma.c:102)
> blk_dma_map_iter_start (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/block/blk-mq-dma.c:123 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/block/blk-mq-dma.c:196)
> blk_rq_dma_map_iter_start (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/block/blk-mq-dma.c:228)
> nvme_prep_rq+0xb8/0x9b8
> nvme_queue_rq+0x44/0x1b0
> blk_mq_dispatch_rq_list (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/block/blk-mq.c:2129)
> __blk_mq_sched_dispatch_requests (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/block/blk-mq-sched.c:314)
> blk_mq_sched_dispatch_requests (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/block/blk-mq-sched.c:329)
> blk_mq_run_work_fn (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/block/blk-mq.c:219 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/block/blk-mq.c:231)
> process_one_work (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/workqueue.c:991 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/workqueue.c:3213)
> worker_thread (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/./include/linux/list.h:163 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/./include/linux/list.h:191 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/./include/linux/list.h:319 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/workqueue.c:1153 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/workqueue.c:1205 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/workqueue.c:3426)
> kthread (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/kthread.c:386 /home/leit/Devel/upstream/kernel/kthread.c:457)
> ret_from_fork (/home/leit/Devel/upstream/entry.S:861)
>
>
> Looking at memblock debug logs, I haven't seen anything related to
> 0x0000000006d6e400.

It looks like the crash happens way after memblock passed all the memory to
buddy. Why do you think this is related to memblock?

> I got the output of `dmesg | grep memblock` in, in case you are curious:
>
> https://github.com/leitao/debug/blob/main/pastebin/memblock/dmesg_grep_memblock.txt
>
> Thanks
> --breno
>

--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.