Re: [PATCH v4 6/6] RISC-V: Free-up initrd in free_initrd_mem()

From: Mike Rapoport
Date: Wed Feb 13 2019 - 02:38:49 EST


Hi,

On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 10:44:19PM -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 06:32:24AM +0000, Anup Patel wrote:
> > index 9cd583b6d1cd..c22b873de856 100644
> > --- a/arch/riscv/kernel/setup.c
> > +++ b/arch/riscv/kernel/setup.c
> > @@ -97,8 +97,9 @@ static void __init setup_initrd(void)
> > initrd_end = 0;
> > }
> >
> > -void free_initrd_mem(unsigned long start, unsigned long end)
> > +void __init free_initrd_mem(unsigned long start, unsigned long end)
> > {
> > + memblock_free(__pa(start), end - start);
>
> I'm pretty sure this should be a call to free_reserved_area instead.
>
> All regions reserved using memblock_reserved and not freed before
> initializing the MM are marked reserved and don't have valid page
> counts, etc.
>
> So we need the actions in free_reserved_area to actually make the
> memory useful. Now every other architecture except for arm64
> seems to do fine without a memblock_free. I'm not an expert on
> memblock (but I've CCed one), but I guess the reason is that once
> the kernel has booted we don't really care about freeing memblock
> area.

This late in the boot process there should be a call to
free_reserved_area() to give pages to the buddy allocator.

memblock_free() is has no real effect at this point, no idea why arm64
calls it.

--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.