Re: [PATCH] Add debugging aid for memory initialisation problems

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Mon Nov 27 2006 - 09:57:27 EST


On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, Andi Kleen wrote:

On Monday 27 November 2006 15:08, Mel Gorman wrote:
A number of bug reports have been submitted related to memory initialisation
that would have been easier to debug if the PFN of page addresses were
available. The dmesg output is often insufficient to find that information
so debugging patches need to be sent to the reporting user.

So how many new lines does that add overall?

I don't know for sure, but it's probably around the 150 LOC mark from about 12 patches, mainly in page_alloc.c. A significant portion of the patches were documentation, comments and providing debugging information. As it is, any bug fix or improvement in that code will now apply to all architectures using the API, not just one.

I expect the net code difference to drop as some of the mem= parsing (which currently does not always work AFAIK) gets handled in generic rather than arch-specific code. These type of cleanups will take a while. I would also expect the net difference to drop if more architectures used the API instead of arch-specific code but I couldn't test on all arches.

Your memmap patches overall
were already one of the most noisy additions we had for a very long time.


The worst of the noise should be over now. The last patch I sent isn't necessary. I only sent it on because it would have cut down on the time needed to fix Andre's issue.

--
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab
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