[PATCH v4 2/4] memblock: update initialization of reserved pages

Mike Rapoport rppt at kernel.org
Tue Apr 1 04:33:26 PDT 2025


On Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 04:13:56PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2025-03-31 at 17:50 +0300, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 01:50:33PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2021-05-11 at 13:05 +0300, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> > > 
> > > On platforms with large NOMAP regions (e.g. which are actually reserved
> > > for guest memory to keep it out of the Linux address map and allow for
> > > kexec-based live update of the hypervisor), this pointless loop ends up
> > > taking a significant amount of time which is visible as guest steal
> > > time during the live update.
> > > 
> > > Can reserve_bootmem_region() skip the loop *completely* if no PFN in
> > > the range from start to end is valid? Or tweak the loop itself to have
> > > an 'else' case which skips to the next valid PFN? Something like
> > > 
> > >  for(...) {
> > >     if (pfn_valid(start_pfn)) {
> > >        ...
> > >     } else {
> > >        start_pfn = next_valid_pfn(start_pfn);
> > >     }
> > >  }
> > 
> > My understanding is that you have large reserved NOMAP ranges that don't
> > appear as memory at all, so no memory map for them is created and so
> > pfn_valid() is false for pfns in those ranges.
> > 
> > If this is the case one way indeed would be to make
> > reserve_bootmem_region() skip ranges with no valid pfns.
> > 
> > Another way could be to memblock_reserved_mark_noinit() such ranges and
> > then reserve_bootmem_region() won't even get called, but that would require
> > firmware to pass that information somehow.
> 
> I was thinking along these lines (not even build tested)...
> 
> I don't much like the (unsigned long)-1 part. I might make the helper
> 'static inline bool first_valid_pfn (unsigned long *pfn)' and return
> success or failure. But that's an implementation detail.
> 
> index 6d1fb6162ac1..edd27ba3e908 100644
> --- a/include/asm-generic/memory_model.h
> +++ b/include/asm-generic/memory_model.h
> @@ -29,8 +29,43 @@ static inline int pfn_valid(unsigned long pfn)
>         return pfn >= pfn_offset && (pfn - pfn_offset) < max_mapnr;
>  }
>  #define pfn_valid pfn_valid
> +
> +static inline unsigned long first_valid_pfn(unsigned long pfn)
> +{
> +       /* avoid <linux/mm.h> include hell */
> +       extern unsigned long max_mapnr;
> +       unsigned long pfn_offset = ARCH_PFN_OFFSET;
> +
> +       if (pfn < pfn_offset)
> +               return pfn_offset;
> +
> +       if ((pfn - pfn_offset) < max_mapnr)
> +               return pfn;
> +
> +       return (unsigned long)(-1);
> +}

This seems about right for FLATMEM. For SPARSEMEM it would be something
along these lines (I kept dubious -1):

static inline unsigned long first_valid_pfn(unsigned long pfn)
{
	unsigned long nr = pfn_to_section_nr(pfn);

	do {
		if (pfn_valid(pfn))
			return pfn;
		pfn = section_nr_to_pfn(nr++);
	} while (nr < NR_MEM_SECTIONS);

	return (unsigned long)-1;
}

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Mike.



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