Re: [regression?] [resend] Memory zone info seems incomplete in boottime dmesg output

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To: Sven Wegener <sven.wegener@...>, Andrew Morton <akpm@...>
Cc: <linux-kernel@...>, Kernel Testers List <kernel-testers@...>
Date: Thursday, August 14, 2008 - 4:46 pm

On Thursday 14 August 2008, Sven Wegener wrote:

Yes, it is.


That gives me:
On node 0 totalpages: 521751
mminit::memmap_init DMA zone: 88 pages used for memmap
mminit::memmap_init DMA zone: 1839 pages reserved
  DMA zone: 2072 pages, LIFO batch:0
mminit::memmap_init Initialising map node 0 zone 0 pfns 0 -> 4096
mminit::memmap_init DMA32 zone: 11127 pages used for memmap
  DMA32 zone: 506625 pages, LIFO batch:31
mminit::memmap_init Initialising map node 0 zone 1 pfns 4096 -> 521984
mminit::memmap_init Normal zone: 0 pages used for memmap
mminit::memmap_init Movable zone: 0 pages used for memmap

If I now add up the number of pages, I get 521751 again.

What was the rationale behind "hiding" resevered/memmapped pages behind an 
additional debug option?
I can see the point of suppressing the last 2 lines which list empty 
zones, but not the others which list actual usage of pages in active 
zones.
Listing a "total number of pages" and then not specifying all categories 
that make up the total seems like a bad choice to me. It would seem more 
logical to either hide all related info, or to show something that is 
numerically consistent.

I can now see where my "missing" pages have gone: DMA reserved up by 
almost 600 and DMA32 memmap up by 4000. Will need to check if that's 
indeed the result of the extra "kernel hacking" options I enabled.


On Thursday 14 August 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:

No idea. That last line does seem out of context and - at least to me - 
does not mean anything. mminit_loglevel=3 does not add any extra info 
there.
Looks to be related to the fact that the debug output (and the old 
output!) shows the "Movable zone" as empty (0 pages)? Maybe this line 
should be suppressed in that case?


There seems to be another (probably minor) issue in free_area_init_nodes 
in mm/page_alloc.c. It defines 'enum zone_type i', but also uses 'i' as a 
counter for MAX_NUMNODES and nr_nodemap_entries which look to be 
different data types.
My C-foo is very limited, so I may be just missing something.

Cheers,
FJP
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Re: [regression?] [resend] Memory zone info seems incomplete..., Frans Pop, (Thu Aug 14, 4:46 pm)