Re: [PATCH 3/3] backends/hostmem: Round up memory size for qemu_madvise() and mbind()

["Michal Prívozník" <mprivozn@redhat.com>]

On 5/28/24 18:47, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> Am 28.05.24 um 18:15 schrieb Michal Privoznik:
>> ./build/qemu-system-x86_64 \ -m
>> size=8389632k,slots=16,maxmem=25600000k \ -object
>> '{"qom-type":"memory-backend-file","id":"ram-node0","mem-path":"hugepages2M","prealloc":true,"size":8590983168,"host-nodes":[0],"policy":"bind"}' \ -numa node,nodeid=0,cpus=0,memdev=ram-node0
> 
> For DIMMs and friends we now (again) enforce that the size must be
> aligned to the page size:
> 
> commit 540a1abbf0b243e4cfb4333c5d30a041f7080ba4
> Author: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
> Date:   Wed Jan 17 14:55:54 2024 +0100
> 
>     memory-device: reintroduce memory region size check
> 
>     We used to check that the memory region size is multiples of the
> overall
>     requested address alignment for the device memory address.
> 
>     We removed that check, because there are cases (i.e., hv-balloon) where
>     devices unconditionally request an address alignment that has a very
> large
>     alignment (i.e., 32 GiB), but the actual memory device size might
> not be
>     multiples of that alignment.
> 
>     However, this change:
> 
>     (a) allows for some practically impossible DIMM sizes, like "1GB+1
> byte".
>     (b) allows for DIMMs that partially cover hugetlb pages, previously
>         reported in [1].
> ...
> 
> Partial hugetlb pages do not particularly make sense; wasting memory. Do
> we expect people to actually ave working setup that we might break when
> disallowing such configurations? Or would we actually help them identify
> that something non-sensical is happening?
> 
> When using memory-backend-memfd, we already do get a proper error:
> 
>  ./build/qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2047m -object
> memory-backend-memfd,id=ram-node0,hugetlb=on,size=2047m,reserve=off
> -numa node,nodeid=0,cpus=0,memdev=ram-node0 -S
> qemu-system-x86_64: failed to resize memfd to 2146435072: Invalid argument
> 
> So this only applies to memory-backend-file, where we maybe should fail
> in a similar way?
> 

Yeah, let's fail in that case. But non-aligned length is just one of
many reasons madvise()/mbind() can fail. What about the others? Should
we make them report an error or just a warning?

Michal