On Fri, 3 Jul 2020 18:28:23 +0530 Srikar Dronamraju [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

The memory hotplug changes that somehow because you can hotremove numa
nodes and therefore make the nodemask sparse but that is not a common
case. I am not sure what would happen if a completely new node was added
and its corresponding node was already used by the renumbered one
though. It would likely conflate the two I am afraid. But I am not sure
this is really possible with x86 and a lack of a bug report would
suggest that nobody is doing that at least.

JFYI,
Satheesh copied in this mailchain had opened a bug a year on crash with vcpu
hotplug on memoryless node. 

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202187

So...  do we merge this patch or not?  Seems that the overall view is
"risky but nobody is likely to do anything better any time soon"?