Re: [PATCH 0/5] Manual definition of Soft Reserved memory devices

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 12:07 PM Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > Given the current dearth of systems that supply an ACPI HMAT table, and
> > the utility of being able to manually define device-dax "hmem" instances
> > via the efi_fake_mem= option, relax the requirements for creating these
> > devices. Specifically, add an option (numa=nohmat) to optionally disable
> > consideration of the HMAT and update efi_fake_mem= to behave like
> > memmap=nn!ss in terms of delimiting device boundaries.
>
> So, am I correct in deducing that your primary motivation is testing
> without hardware/firmware support?

My primary motivation is making the dax_kmem facility useful to
shipping platforms that have performance differentiated memory, but
may not have EFI-defined soft-reservations / HMAT (or
non-EFI-ACPI-platform equivalent). I'm anticipating HMAT enabled
platforms where the platform firmware policy for what is
soft-reserved, or not, is not the policy the system owner would pick.
I'd also highlight Joao's work [1] (see the TODO section) as an
indication of the demand for custom carving memory resources and
applying the device-dax memory management interface.

> This looks like a bit of a hack to
> me, and I think maybe it would be better to just emulate the HMAT using
> qemu.  I don't have a strong objection, though.

Yeah, qemu emulation does not help when you, the system owner, have a
different use case than what the bare-metal platform-firmware
envisioned for "specific-purpose memory".

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200110190313.17144-1-joao.m.martins@xxxxxxxxxx/