arm64 crashkernel fails to boot on acpi-only machines due to ACPI regions being no longer mapped as NOMAP

[AKASHI Takahiro]

On Tue, Dec 26, 2017 at 02:58:45PM +0800, Dave Young wrote:
> On 12/26/17 at 08:26am, Bhupesh Sharma wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 26, 2017 at 7:58 AM, AKASHI Takahiro
> > <takahiro.akashi at linaro.org> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Dec 26, 2017 at 09:35:17AM +0800, Dave Young wrote:
> > >> [snip]
> > >> > > > Well, we may be able to change pr_warn() to pr_warn_once() here, but
> > >> > > > I hope that adding "numa=off" to kernel command line should also work.
> > >> > >
> > >> > > Hmm, adding "numa=off" to crashkernel bootargs works, and TBH it was
> > >> > > my initial thought process as well, but I am not sure if this will
> > >> > > cause any regressions on aarch64 systems which use crashdump feature.
> > >> >
> > >> > It should be fine since we use numa=off by default for all other arches
> > >> > ie. x86, ppc64 and s390. Actually disabling numa in kdump kernel can save
> > >> > mm component memory usage.
> > >> >
> > >>
> > >> Forgot to say I means in RHEL and Fedora we use numa=off for kdump..
> > >
> > > Thank you for the clarification.
> > > (It might be better to make numa off automatically if maxcpus == 0 (and 1?).)
> > >
> > 
> > Not sure if we can leave this to the distribution-specific kdump
> > scripts (as the crashkernel boot can be held up for sufficient time
> > and may appear stuck). The distribution scripts may be different (for
> > e.g. ubuntu and RHEL/fedora) across distributions and may have
> > different bootarg options.
> 
> Personally I think distribution should take care of this param as for
> kdump.  But as AKASHI said it could be a issue for 1st kernel with
> nr_cpus=1 booting.  Problem is why we do not see this issue on other
> machines.

The issue won't be kdump-specific. Theoretically, it also takes place
when "mem=" is specified on numa.

Since we can avoid annoying messages by adding "numa=off", I'm reluctant to
suppress most of messages but the first. My suggestion here is to add some
notes in Documentation/kdump/kdump.txt regarding NUMA case.

Thanks,
Takahiro AKASHI


> > 
> > So how about considering a kernel fix only which doesn't require
> > relying on changing the distribution-specific kdump scripts, as we
> > should avoid introducing a regression while trying to fix a regression
> > :)
> > 
> > Just my 2 cents.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Bhupesh
> 
> Thanks
> Dave