Re: [PATCH v7 4/4] kexec_file: Load kernel at top of system RAM if required

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Mon Jul 23 2018 - 10:34:52 EST


On Thu 19-07-18 23:17:53, Baoquan He wrote:
> Kexec has been a formal feature in our distro, and customers owning
> those kind of very large machine can make use of this feature to speed
> up the reboot process. On uefi machine, the kexec_file loading will
> search place to put kernel under 4G from top to down. As we know, the
> 1st 4G space is DMA32 ZONE, dma, pci mmcfg, bios etc all try to consume
> it. It may have possibility to not be able to find a usable space for
> kernel/initrd. From the top down of the whole memory space, we don't
> have this worry.

I do not have the full context here but let me note that you should be
careful when doing top-down reservation because you can easily get into
hotplugable memory and break the hotremove usecase. We even warn when
this is done. See memblock_find_in_range_node
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs