Re: [PATCH v1 3/3] memory-hotplug.rst: document the "auto-movable" online policy
From: David Hildenbrand <hidden>
Date: 2021-10-08 08:33:21
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It's essentially ignored with the auto-movable policy for memory hotplugged after boot (!MEMBLOCK_HOTPLUG). That's why only the description of "contig-zones" below describes how it interacts with the ``movable_node``, and we make it clear here that it's restricted to the "contig-zones" policy as well. <details> Bare metal, where we care about reliably unplugging hotplugged memory usually configures auto-onlining to "online_movable": for example, that's the case on RHEL. auto-movable doesn't make too much sense for bare metal: the nature of "movable_node" is to essentially online anything that might get hotunplugged MOVABLE, especially after hotplugging memory and rebooting: that is highly dangerous especially in virtualized environments. "auto-movable" is valuable in virtualized environments, where we add memory via: * add_memory_driver_managed() like virtio-mem, whereby such memory is never part of the firmware provided memory-map, so the policy is always in control even after a reboot. * Hotplugged virtual DIMMs, such as provided by x86-64/arm64, whereby we don't include these DIMMs in the firmware-provided memory map, but ACPI code adds them after early boot, making it behave similar to add_memory_driver_managed() -- the policy is always in control even after a reboot. </details>Do you want to put it somewhere in Documentation/ ? It's already written anyway ;-)
I'll add to the "auto-movable" description: "This policy ignores the ``movable_node`` kernel command line parameter and isn't really applicable in environments that require it (e.g., bare metal with hotunpluggable nodes) where hotplugged memory might be exposed via the firmware-provided memory map early during boot to the system instead of getting detected, added and onlined later during boot (such as done by virito-mem or by some hypervisors implementing emulated DIMMs)." Thanks Mike! -- Thanks, David / dhildenb