Commit 9181a980 authored by David Hildenbrand's avatar David Hildenbrand Committed by Linus Torvalds

mm: document semantics of ZONE_MOVABLE

Let's document what ZONE_MOVABLE means, how it's used, and which special
cases we have regarding unmovable pages (memory offlining vs.  migration /
allocations).
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: default avatarMike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
Cc: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com>
Cc: Pankaj Gupta <pankaj.gupta.linux@gmail.com>
Cc: Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>
Cc: Jason Wang <jasowang@redhat.com>
Cc: Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200816125333.7434-7-david@redhat.comSigned-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 27f85279
......@@ -396,6 +396,41 @@ enum zone_type {
*/
ZONE_HIGHMEM,
#endif
/*
* ZONE_MOVABLE is similar to ZONE_NORMAL, except that it contains
* movable pages with few exceptional cases described below. Main use
* cases for ZONE_MOVABLE are to make memory offlining/unplug more
* likely to succeed, and to locally limit unmovable allocations - e.g.,
* to increase the number of THP/huge pages. Notable special cases are:
*
* 1. Pinned pages: (long-term) pinning of movable pages might
* essentially turn such pages unmovable. Memory offlining might
* retry a long time.
* 2. memblock allocations: kernelcore/movablecore setups might create
* situations where ZONE_MOVABLE contains unmovable allocations
* after boot. Memory offlining and allocations fail early.
* 3. Memory holes: kernelcore/movablecore setups might create very rare
* situations where ZONE_MOVABLE contains memory holes after boot,
* for example, if we have sections that are only partially
* populated. Memory offlining and allocations fail early.
* 4. PG_hwpoison pages: while poisoned pages can be skipped during
* memory offlining, such pages cannot be allocated.
* 5. Unmovable PG_offline pages: in paravirtualized environments,
* hotplugged memory blocks might only partially be managed by the
* buddy (e.g., via XEN-balloon, Hyper-V balloon, virtio-mem). The
* parts not manged by the buddy are unmovable PG_offline pages. In
* some cases (virtio-mem), such pages can be skipped during
* memory offlining, however, cannot be moved/allocated. These
* techniques might use alloc_contig_range() to hide previously
* exposed pages from the buddy again (e.g., to implement some sort
* of memory unplug in virtio-mem).
*
* In general, no unmovable allocations that degrade memory offlining
* should end up in ZONE_MOVABLE. Allocators (like alloc_contig_range())
* have to expect that migrating pages in ZONE_MOVABLE can fail (even
* if has_unmovable_pages() states that there are no unmovable pages,
* there can be false negatives).
*/
ZONE_MOVABLE,
#ifdef CONFIG_ZONE_DEVICE
ZONE_DEVICE,
......
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