Thread (7 messages) 7 messages, 3 authors, 2011-02-09
STALE5596d

[PATCH] ARM: mm: enforce pageblock alignment when freeing memmap entries at init

From: Mel Gorman <hidden>
Date: 2011-01-26 08:29:16

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 03:47:11PM -0800, Dima Zavin wrote:
On some machines, the nodes do not always start on pageblock
boundaries. In these cases it is possible for free_unused_memmap
to free mappings for pages inside a pageblock with otherwise
valid pages. This presents problems for page migration since it
operates on whole pageblocks at a time.
This patch is not aligning on a pageblock boundary - it's aligning on
MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES which is the boundary the buddy allocator works on.
This is a minor but important nit as different assumptions are made
about pageblocks and MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES. Anyway;

If the node is not starting on the MAX_ORDER boundary then node_start_pfn
should also not be on the same boundary but the patch does not imply
that this has been broken. If anything it appears at a glance that there
is memmap *not* being freed because it was allocated on the
MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES boundary and only partially freed.

The comment then is confusing because the function is freeing memmap but
rounding down to free more of it ensures that all pages get a mapping?
It's not clear at all to me what was broken or how this patch fixes it
but bear in mind that it's rare I look at how ARM is initialised.
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
Round down bank_start to pageblock boundary so that whole
pageblocks always have valid mappings.

Signed-off-by: Dima Zavin <redacted>
---
 arch/arm/mm/init.c |    6 +++++-
 1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
diff --git a/arch/arm/mm/init.c b/arch/arm/mm/init.c
index 5164069..98de5d8 100644
--- a/arch/arm/mm/init.c
+++ b/arch/arm/mm/init.c
@@ -418,7 +418,11 @@ static void __init free_unused_memmap(struct meminfo *mi)
 	for_each_bank(i, mi) {
 		struct membank *bank = &mi->bank[i];
 
-		bank_start = bank_pfn_start(bank);
+		/* Round bank_start down to the start of a pageblock so that
+		 * all pages in a pageblock always have a mapping.
+		 */
+		bank_start = round_down(bank_pfn_start(bank),
+					MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES);
 
 		/*
 		 * If we had a previous bank, and there is a space
-- 
1.7.3.1
-- 
Mel Gorman
Linux Technology Center
IBM Dublin Software Lab
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