[PATCH 2/2] x86 e820: Introduce memmap=resetusablemap for kdump usage

[H. Peter Anvin]

To be more clear: the max_pfn stuff seems like a relic of the past, and I am wondering what it would take to get rid of it.

It clearly has the wrong semantics, except perhaps in the most trivial allocator models.

Yinghai Lu <yinghai at kernel.org> wrote:

>On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 6:11 PM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
>> On 01/28/2013 06:10 PM, Yinghai Lu wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> kexec-tools will change that to E820_KDUMP_RESERVED (or other good
>name).
>>>
>>> We only need to update kernel to get old max_pfn by
>>> checking E820_KDUMP_RESERVED.
>>>
>>
>> OK, I have asked this before, but I still have not gotten any
>acceptable
>> answer:
>>
>> Why do we still have max_*_pfn at all?  Shouldn't it all be based on
>> memblocks by now?
>
>saved_max_pfn is used for kdump:
>drivers/char/mem.c::read_oldmem will stop there.
>...
>        while (count) {
>                pfn = *ppos / PAGE_SIZE;
>                if (pfn > saved_max_pfn)
>                        return read;
>...

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