[RFC/RFT PATCH 0/3] arm64: drop pfn_valid_within() and simplify pfn_valid()

[Anshuman Khandual]

Adding James here.

+ James Morse <james.morse at arm.com>

On 4/7/21 10:56 PM, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> From: Mike Rapoport <rppt at linux.ibm.com>
> 
> Hi,
> 
> These patches aim to remove CONFIG_HOLES_IN_ZONE and essentially hardwire
> pfn_valid_within() to 1. 

That would be really great for arm64 platform as it will save CPU cycles on
many generic MM paths, given that our pfn_valid() has been expensive.

> 
> The idea is to mark NOMAP pages as reserved in the memory map and restore

Though I am not really sure, would that possibly be problematic for UEFI/EFI
use cases as it might have just treated them as normal struct pages till now.

> the intended semantics of pfn_valid() to designate availability of struct
> page for a pfn.

Right, that would be better as the current semantics is not ideal.

> 
> With this the core mm will be able to cope with the fact that it cannot use
> NOMAP pages and the holes created by NOMAP ranges within MAX_ORDER blocks
> will be treated correctly even without the need for pfn_valid_within.
> 
> The patches are only boot tested on qemu-system-aarch64 so I'd really
> appreciate memory stress tests on real hardware.

Did some preliminary memory stress tests on a guest with portions of memory
marked as MEMBLOCK_NOMAP and did not find any obvious problem. But this might
require some testing on real UEFI environment with firmware using MEMBLOCK_NOMAP
memory to make sure that changing these struct pages to PageReserved() is safe.


> 
> If this actually works we'll be one step closer to drop custom pfn_valid()
> on arm64 altogether.

Right, planning to rework and respin the RFC originally sent last month.

https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-mm/patch/1615174073-10520-1-git-send-email-anshuman.khandual@arm.com/