On 01/10/2018 18:24, Dave Hansen wrote:

quoted

How should a policy in user space look like when new memory gets added
- on s390x? Not onlining paravirtualized memory is very wrong.

Because we're going to balloon it away in a moment anyway?

No, rether somebody wanted this VM to have more memory, so it should use
it - basically what HyperV or XEN also do. (in contrast to the concept
of standby memory on s390).

quoted

We have auto-onlining.  Why isn't that being used on s390?

Do you mean the sys parameter? How would that help?

quoted

So the type of memory is very important here to have in user space.
Relying on checks like "isS390()", "isKVMGuest()" or "isHyperVGuest()"
to decide whether to online memory and how to online memory is wrong.
Only some specific memory types (which I call "normal") are to be
handled by user space.

For the other ones, we exactly know what to do:
- standby? don't online

I think you're horribly conflating the software desire for what the stae
should be and the hardware itself.

Agreed, user space should be able to configure it.

quoted

quoted

As for the OOM issues, that sounds like something we need to fix by
refusing to do (or delaying) hot-add operations once we consume too much
ZONE_NORMAL from memmap[]s rather than trying to indirectly tell
userspace to hurry thing along.

That is a moving target and doing that automatically is basically
impossible.

Nah.  We know how much metadata we've allocated.  We know how much
ZONE_NORMAL we are eating.  We can *easily* add something to
add_memory() that just sleeps until the ratio is not out-of-whack.

quoted

You can add a lot of memory to the movable zone and
everything is fine. Suddenly a lot of processes are started - boom.
MOVABLE should only every be used if you expect an unplug. And for
paravirtualized devices, a "typical" unplug does not exist.

No, it's more complicated than that.  People use MOVABLE, for instance,
to allow more consistent huge page allocations.  It's certainly not just
hot-remove.

As noted in the other thread, that's a good point. We have to allow to
make a decision in user space.

I agree to your initial proposal to distinguish "standby" from
"auto-online". It would allow to have sane defaults in user space.

-- 

Thanks,

David / dhildenb