[PATCH v1 03/14] mm: add iomem vma selection for memory migration

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, Sep 2, 2021 at 1:18 AM Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst.de> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 01, 2021 at 11:40:43AM -0400, Felix Kuehling wrote:
> > >>> It looks like I'm totally misunderstanding what you are adding here
> > >>> then.  Why do we need any special treatment at all for memory that
> > >>> has normal struct pages and is part of the direct kernel map?
> > >> The pages are like normal memory for purposes of mapping them in CPU
> > >> page tables and for coherent access from the CPU.
> > > That's the user page tables.  What about the kernel direct map?
> > > If there is a normal kernel struct page backing there really should
> > > be no need for the pgmap.
> >
> > I'm not sure. The physical address ranges are in the UEFI system address
> > map as special-purpose memory. Does Linux create the struct pages and
> > kernel direct map for that without a pgmap call? I didn't see that last
> > time I went digging through that code.
>
> So doing some googling finds a patch from Dan that claims to hand EFI
> special purpose memory to the device dax driver.  But when I try to
> follow the version that got merged it looks it is treated simply as an
> MMIO region to be claimed by drivers, which would not get a struct page.
>
> Dan, did I misunderstand how E820_TYPE_SOFT_RESERVED works?

The original implementation of "soft reserve" support depended on the
combination of the EFI special purpose memory type and the ACPI HMAT
to define the device ranges. The requirement for ACPI HMAT was relaxed
later with commit:

5ccac54f3e12 ACPI: HMAT: attach a device for each soft-reserved range

The expectation is that system software policy can then either use the
device interface, assign a portion of the reservation back to the page
allocator, ignore the reservation altogether. Is this discussion
asking for a way to assign this memory to the GPU driver to manage?
device-dax already knows how to hand off to the page-allocator, seems
reasonable for it to be able to hand-off to another driver.