Re: collision between ZONE_MOVABLE and memblock allocations

[Michal Hocko]

On Fri 21-07-23 14:20:09, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 04:26:04PM -0600, Ross Zwisler wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 08:44:34AM +0300, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> > > 3. Switch memblock to use bottom up allocations. Historically memblock
> > > allocated memory from the top to avoid corrupting the kernel image and to
> > > avoid exhausting precious ZONE_DMA. I believe we can use bottom-up
> > > allocations with lower limit of memblock allocations set to 16M.
> > > 
> > > With the hack below no memblock allocations will end up in ZONE_MOVABLE:
> > 
> > Yep, I've confirmed that for my use cases at least this does the trick, thank
> > you!  I had thought about moving the memblock allocations, but had no idea it
> > was (basically) already supported and thought it'd be much riskier than just
> > adjusting where ZONE_MOVABLE lived.
> > 
> > Is there a reason for this to not be a real option for users, maybe per a
> > kernel config knob or something?  I'm happy to explore other options in this
> > thread, but this is doing the trick so far.
> 
> I think we can make x86 always use bottom up.
> 
> To do this properly we'd need to set lower limit for memblock allocations
> to MAX_DMA32_PFN and allow fallback below it so that early allocations
> won't eat memory from ZONE_DMA32.
> 
> Aside from x86 boot being fragile in general I don't see why this wouldn't
> work.

This would add a very subtle depency of a functionality on the specific
boot allocator behavior and that is bad for long term maintenance.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs