Re: your mail

Joonsoo Kim
2017-04-20T01:28:11Z

On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 10:15:15AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Mon 17-04-17 14:47:20, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 15, 2017 at 02:17:31PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > here I 3 more preparatory patches which I meant to send on Thursday but
> > > forgot... After more thinking about pfn walkers I have realized that
> > > the current code doesn't check offline holes in zones. From a quick
> > > review that doesn't seem to be a problem currently. Pfn walkers can race
> > > with memory offlining and with the original hotplug impementation those
> > > offline pages can change the zone but I wasn't able to find any serious
> > > problem other than small confusion. The new hotplug code, will not have
> > > any valid zone, though so those code paths should check PageReserved
> > > to rule offline holes. I hope I have addressed all of them in these 3
> > > patches. I would appreciate if Vlastimil and Jonsoo double check after
> > > me.
> >
> > Hello, Michal.
> >
> > s/Jonsoo/Joonsoo. :)
>
> ups, sorry about that.
>
> > I'm not sure that it's a good idea to add PageResereved() check in pfn
> > walkers. First, this makes struct page validity check as two steps,
> > pfn_valid() and then PageResereved().
>
> Yes, those are two separate checkes because semantically they are
> different. Not all pfn walkers do care about the online status.

If offlined page has no valid information, reading information
about offlined pages are just wrong. So, all pfn walkers that reads
information about the page should do care about it.

I guess that many callers for pfn_valid() is in this category.

>
> > If we should not use struct page
> > in this case, it's better to pfn_valid() returns false rather than
> > adding a separate check. Anyway, we need to fix more places (all pfn
> > walker?) if we want to check validity by two steps.
>
> Which pfn walkers you have in mind?

For example, kpagecount_read() in fs/proc/page.c. I searched it by
using pfn_valid().

> > The other problem I found is that your change will makes some
> > contiguous zones to be considered as non-contiguous. Memory allocated
> > by memblock API is also marked as PageResereved. If we consider this as
> > a hole, we will set such a zone as non-contiguous.
>
> Why would that be a problem? We shouldn't touch those pages anyway?

Skipping those pages in compaction are valid so no problem in this
case.

The problem I mentioned above is that adding PageReserved() check in
__pageblock_pfn_to_page() invalidates optimization by
set_zone_contiguous(). In compaction, we need to get a valid struct
page and it requires a lot of work. There is performance problem
report due to this so set_zone_contiguous() optimization is added. It
checks if the zone is contiguous or not in boot time. If zone is
determined as contiguous, we can easily get a valid struct page in
runtime without expensive checks.

Your patch try to add PageReserved() to __pageblock_pfn_to_page(). It
woule make that zone->contiguous usually returns false since memory
used by memblock API is marked as PageReserved() and your patch regard
it as a hole. It invalidates set_zone_contiguous() optimization and I
worry about it.

>
> > And, I guess that it's not enough to check PageResereved() in
> > pageblock_pfn_to_page() in order to skip these pages in compaction. If
> > holes are in the middle of the pageblock, pageblock_pfn_to_page()
> > cannot catch it and compaction will use struct page for this hole.
>
> Yes pageblock_pfn_to_page cannot catch it and it wouldn't with the
> current implementation anyway. So the implementation won't be any worse
> than with the current code. On the other hand offline holes will always
> fill the whole pageblock (assuming those are not spanning multiple
> memblocks).
>
> > Therefore, I think that making pfn_valid() return false for not
> > onlined memory is a better solution for this problem. I don't know the
> > implementation detail for hotplug and I don't see your recent change
> > but we may defer memmap initialization until the zone is determined.
> > It will make pfn_valid() return false for un-initialized range.
>
> I am not really sure. pfn_valid is used in many context and its only
> purpose is to tell whether pfn_to_page will return a valid struct page
> AFAIU.
>
> I agree that having more checks is more error prone and we can add a
> helper pfn_to_valid_page or something similar but I believe we can do
> that on top of the current hotplug rework. This would require a non
> trivial amount of changes and I believe that a lacking check for the
> offline holes is not critical - we would (ab)use the lowest zone which
> is similar to (ab)using ZONE_NORMAL/MOVABLE with the original code.

I'm not objecting your hotplug rework. In fact, I don't know the
relationship between this work and hotplug rework. I'm agreeing
with checking offline holes but I don't like the design and
implementation about it.

Let me clarify my desire(?) for this issue.

1. If pfn_valid() returns true, struct page has valid information, at
least, in flags (zone id, node id, flags, etc...). So, we can use them
without checking PageResereved().

2. pfn_valid() for offlined holes returns false. This can be easily
(?) implemented by manipulating SECTION_MAP_MASK in hotplug code. I
guess that there is no reason that pfn_valid() returns true for
offlined holes. If there is, please let me know.

3. We don't need to check PageReserved() in most of pfn walkers in
order to check offline holes.

Thanks.