f67e3fb489
Pull device-dax updates from Dan Williams:
"New device-dax infrastructure to allow persistent memory and other
"reserved" / performance differentiated memories, to be assigned to
the core-mm as "System RAM".
Some users want to use persistent memory as additional volatile
memory. They are willing to cope with potential performance
differences, for example between DRAM and 3D Xpoint, and want to use
typical Linux memory management apis rather than a userspace memory
allocator layered over an mmap() of a dax file. The administration
model is to decide how much Persistent Memory (pmem) to use as System
RAM, create a device-dax-mode namespace of that size, and then assign
it to the core-mm. The rationale for device-dax is that it is a
generic memory-mapping driver that can be layered over any "special
purpose" memory, not just pmem. On subsequent boots udev rules can be
used to restore the memory assignment.
One implication of using pmem as RAM is that mlock() no longer keeps
data off persistent media. For this reason it is recommended to enable
NVDIMM Security (previously merged for 5.0) to encrypt pmem contents
at rest. We considered making this recommendation an actively enforced
requirement, but in the end decided to leave it as a distribution /
administrator policy to allow for emulation and test environments that
lack security capable NVDIMMs.
Summary:
- Replace the /sys/class/dax device model with /sys/bus/dax, and
include a compat driver so distributions can opt-in to the new ABI.
- Allow for an alternative driver for the device-dax address-range
- Introduce the 'kmem' driver to hotplug / assign a device-dax
address-range to the core-mm.
- Arrange for the device-dax target-node to be onlined so that the
newly added memory range can be uniquely referenced by numa apis"
NOTE! I'm not entirely happy with the whole "PMEM as RAM" model because
we currently have special - and very annoying rules in the kernel about
accessing PMEM only with the "MC safe" accessors, because machine checks
inside the regular repeat string copy functions can be fatal in some
(not described) circumstances.
And apparently the PMEM modules can cause that a lot more than regular
RAM. The argument is that this happens because PMEM doesn't necessarily
get scrubbed at boot like RAM does, but that is planned to be added for
the user space tooling.
Quoting Dan from another email:
"The exposure can be reduced in the volatile-RAM case by scanning for
and clearing errors before it is onlined as RAM. The userspace tooling
for that can be in place before v5.1-final. There's also runtime
notifications of errors via acpi_nfit_uc_error_notify() from
background scrubbers on the DIMM devices. With that mechanism the
kernel could proactively clear newly discovered poison in the volatile
case, but that would be additional development more suitable for v5.2.
I understand the concern, and the need to highlight this issue by
tapping the brakes on feature development, but I don't see PMEM as RAM
making the situation worse when the exposure is also there via DAX in
the PMEM case. Volatile-RAM is arguably a safer use case since it's
possible to repair pages where the persistent case needs active
application coordination"
* tag 'devdax-for-5.1' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/nvdimm/nvdimm:
device-dax: "Hotplug" persistent memory for use like normal RAM
mm/resource: Let walk_system_ram_range() search child resources
mm/memory-hotplug: Allow memory resources to be children
mm/resource: Move HMM pr_debug() deeper into resource code
mm/resource: Return real error codes from walk failures
device-dax: Add a 'modalias' attribute to DAX 'bus' devices
device-dax: Add a 'target_node' attribute
device-dax: Auto-bind device after successful new_id
acpi/nfit, device-dax: Identify differentiated memory with a unique numa-node
device-dax: Add /sys/class/dax backwards compatibility
device-dax: Add support for a dax override driver
device-dax: Move resource pinning+mapping into the common driver
device-dax: Introduce bus + driver model
device-dax: Start defining a dax bus model
device-dax: Remove multi-resource infrastructure
device-dax: Kill dax_region base
device-dax: Kill dax_region ida
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