Re: [2.6.20.16 review 08/28] x86_64: allocate sparsemem memmap above 4G

From: Willy Tarreau
Date: Sun Aug 12 2007 - 07:53:42 EST


Hi Andi,

On Sun, Aug 12, 2007 at 12:18:11PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Saturday 11 August 2007 21:48, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > On systems with huge amount of physical memory, VFS cache and memory memmap
> > may eat all available system memory under 4G, then the system may fail to
> > allocate swiotlb bounce buffer.
> >
> > There was a fix for this issue in arch/x86_64/mm/numa.c, but that fix dose
> > not cover sparsemem model.
>
> Have you checked if sparsemem even worked in 2.6.20?

No, unfortunately I'm not equipped for that.

> Irc it was quite
> unstable a couple of releases ago. There were times where it rarely
> booted on x86-64 because so few people test it.
> If not the patch is not needed, although relatively harmless too.

OK. So I'd propose the following :
- if someone can confirm that it did not work anyway, I remove the patch
which becomes useless.
- but if we get no confirmation, assuming that in doubt, some people _may_
be relying on it and that it does not affect other ones, we'd keep it.

are you OK with this ?

Thanks,
Willy

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