[PATCH v3 RESEND 08/17] ARM: LPAE: use phys_addr_t in free_memmap()

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 11:09:50AM -0400, Cyril Chemparathy wrote:
> On 9/24/2012 9:41 AM, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 02:29:42PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
>>> This function also calls free_bootmem() which takes unsigned long. Are
>>> patches sent separately for this or we just ignore holes in memmap?
>>> There are other calls to free_bootmem() or reserve_bootmem(), do they
>>> just work with the high phys addresses?
>>
>> Bootmem only deals with physical addresses which fit within the size
>> of an 'unsigned long'.  Unfortunately, the bootmem API is a mess of
>> 'unsigned long' physical addresses and PFNs.
>>
>> Years ago there was a patch to make it use only PFNs but other changes
>> resulted in that patch being thrown away.
>>
>
> A separate patch has been posted for bootmem (see [1]).
>
> Tejun suggested that we'd be better off moving entirely to memblock  
> instead (see [2]).

Yes we should, but that's not as easy as typing a few words in an email.
When I tried it when I integrated memblock into our boot sequence, I
found that sparsemem wouldn't work without bootmem being in place.

It may be that things have now moved on, and we can just eliminate
bootmem once and for all, but that's something I've not looked at for
quite some time.