[PATCH v9 08/12] mm: zero reserved and unavailable struct pages

Michal Hocko mhocko at kernel.org
Wed Oct 4 19:56:36 AEDT 2017


On Tue 03-10-17 11:29:16, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
> On 10/03/2017 09:18 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Wed 20-09-17 16:17:10, Pavel Tatashin wrote:
> > > Some memory is reserved but unavailable: not present in memblock.memory
> > > (because not backed by physical pages), but present in memblock.reserved.
> > > Such memory has backing struct pages, but they are not initialized by going
> > > through __init_single_page().
> > 
> > Could you be more specific where is such a memory reserved?
> > 
> 
> I know of one example: trim_low_memory_range() unconditionally reserves from
> pfn 0, but e820__memblock_setup() might provide the exiting memory from pfn
> 1 (i.e. KVM).

Then just initialize struct pages for that mapping rigth there where a
special API is used.

> But, there could be more based on this comment from linux/page-flags.h:
> 
>  19  * PG_reserved is set for special pages, which can never be swapped out.
> Some
>  20  * of them might not even exist (eg empty_bad_page)...

I have no idea wht empty_bad_page is but a quick grep shows that this is
never used. I might be wrong here but if somebody is reserving a memory
in a special way then we should handle the initialization right there.
E.g. create an API for special memblock reservations.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs


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