Re: [PATCH RESEND] ARM: kdump: 2nd kernel should use strict pfn_valid in SPARSEMEM platform

From: AKASHI Takahiro
Date: Thu May 29 2014 - 00:54:18 EST


Catalin, Will

Can we assume that HAVE_ARCH_PFN_VALID is alway yes on arm64?
Looking at arm64/Kconfig,
config ARCH_HAS_HOLES_MEMORYMODEL
def_bool y if SPARSEMEM
...
config HAVE_ARCH_PFN_VALID
def_bool ARCH_HAS_HOLES_MEMORYMODEL || !SPARSEMEM

is this intentional?

-Takahiro AKASHI

On 05/28/2014 05:44 PM, Wang Nan wrote:
This patch removes an irrational limitation for crash dump kernel on ARM
platform with SPARSEMEM enabled.

Without this patch, crash reservation area for a crash dump kernel with
SPARSEMEM selected must occupy a full section plus 1MiB. If not,
elfcorehdr and some memory space used by the first kernel will unable to
get accessed. This is caused by pfn_valid: fast pfn_valid ragards any
pfn in a valid section as valid and prevents it to be ioremapped.

This limitation wastes memory, because sections are always large and
crash dump kernel should be as small as possible.

This patch selects HAVE_ARCH_PFN_VALID for CRASH_DUMP, makes crash dump
kernel to use strict version of pfn_valid().

Signed-off-by: Wang Nan <wangnan0@xxxxxxxxxx>
---

This is the third time I post this patch. The previous records can be
retrived from:

http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2014-May/256498.html
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2014-May/257472.html

Different from previous version, this patch select HAVE_ARCH_PFN_VALID
right after CRASH_DUMP config entry.

---

arch/arm/Kconfig | 1 +
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

diff --git a/arch/arm/Kconfig b/arch/arm/Kconfig
index c57ddcb..d5ffbb1 100644
--- a/arch/arm/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/arm/Kconfig
@@ -2160,6 +2160,7 @@ config ATAGS_PROC

config CRASH_DUMP
bool "Build kdump crash kernel (EXPERIMENTAL)"
+ select HAVE_ARCH_PFN_VALID if SPARSEMEM
help
Generate crash dump after being started by kexec. This should
be normally only set in special crash dump kernels which are

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