Re: [PATCH v7 2/8] x86/crash: Introduce new options to support cpu and memory hotplug

[Sourabh Jain <sourabhjain@linux.ibm.com>]

On 26/04/22 20:09, Eric DeVolder wrote:
>
>
> On 4/25/22 23:21, Sourabh Jain wrote:
>>
>> On 13/04/22 22:12, Eric DeVolder wrote:
>>> CRASH_HOTPLUG is to enable cpu and memory hotplug support of crash.
>>>
>>> CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ is used to specify the maximum size of
>>> the elfcorehdr buffer/segment.
>>>
>>> This is a preparation for later usage.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Eric DeVolder <eric.devolder@oracle.com>
>>> Acked-by: Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>
>>> ---
>>>   arch/x86/Kconfig | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>>   1 file changed, 26 insertions(+)
>>>
>>> diff --git a/arch/x86/Kconfig b/arch/x86/Kconfig
>>> index b0142e01002e..f7b92ee1bcc7 100644
>>> --- a/arch/x86/Kconfig
>>> +++ b/arch/x86/Kconfig
>>> @@ -2072,6 +2072,32 @@ config CRASH_DUMP
>>>         (CONFIG_RELOCATABLE=y).
>>>         For more details see Documentation/admin-guide/kdump/kdump.rst
>>> +config CRASH_HOTPLUG
>>> +    bool "kernel updates of crash elfcorehdr"
>>> +    depends on CRASH_DUMP && (HOTPLUG_CPU || MEMORY_HOTPLUG) && 
>>> KEXEC_FILE
>>> +    help
>>> +      Enable the kernel to update the crash elfcorehdr (which contains
>>> +      the list of CPUs and memory regions) directly when hot 
>>> plug/unplug
>>> +      of CPUs or memory. Otherwise userspace must monitor these hot
>>> +      plug/unplug change notifications via udev in order to
>>> +      unload-then-reload the crash kernel so that the list of CPUs and
>>> +      memory regions is kept up-to-date. Note that the udev CPU and
>>> +      memory change notifications still occur (however, userspace 
>>> is not
>>> +      required to monitor for crash dump purposes).
>>> +
>>> +config CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ
>>> +    depends on CRASH_HOTPLUG
>>> +    int
>>> +    default 131072
>>> +    help
>>> +      Specify the maximum size of the elfcorehdr buffer/segment.
>>> +      The 128KiB default is sized so that it can accommodate 2048
>>> +      Elf64_Phdr, where each Phdr represents either a CPU or a
>>> +      region of memory.
>>> +      For example, this size can accommodate a machine with up to 1024
>>> +      CPUs and up to 1024 memory regions, eg. as represented by the
>>> +      'System RAM' entries in /proc/iomem.
>>
>> Is it possible to get rid of CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ?
> At the moment, I do not think so. The idea behind this value is to 
> represent the largest number of CPUs and memory regions possible in 
> the system. Today there is NR_CPUS which could be used for CPUs, but 
> there isn't a similar value for memory. I also am not aware of a 
> kernel variable that could be utilized to represent the maximum number 
> of memory regions. If there is, please let me know!
>>
>> How about finding the additional buffer space needed for future CPU 
>> and memory
>> add during the kdump load? Not sure about the feasibility of doing 
>> this in
>> kexec tool (userspace).
>
> I may not understand what you are asking, but the x86 code, for 
> kexec_file_load, does in fact allocate all the space needed (currently 
> via CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ) upon kdump load.
>
> For kexec_load, I've had no problem asking the kexec tool to allocate 
> a larger piece of memory for the elfcorehdr. But it is the same 
> problem as CRASH_HOTPLUG_ELFCOREHDR_SZ; how big? In my workspace I 
> tell kexec tool how big. If there are sysfs visible values for NR_CPU 
> and memory, then we could have kexec pull those and compute.

Yeah dynamic calculation for PT_LOAD sections needed for possible memory 
may not be straightforward. But still I did not get the rational for 
limiting the possible PT_LOAD sections or memory ranges to only 1024. 
Although in kexec tool the max memory ranges for x86 is 32K.

commit 1bc7bc7649fa29d95c98f6a6d8dd2f08734a865c
Author: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Date:   Tue Mar 23 11:01:10 2021 +0100

     crashdump/x86: increase CRASH_MAX_MEMORY_RANGES to 32k

     virtio-mem in Linux adds/removes individual memory blocks (e.g., 128 MB
     each). Linux merges adjacent memory blocks added by virtio-mem 
devices, but
     we can still end up with a very sparse memory layout when unplugging
     memory in corner cases.

     Let's increase the maximum number of crash memory ranges from ~2k 
to 32k.
     32k should be sufficient for a very long time.

     e_phnum field in the header is 16 bits wide, so we can fit a maximum of
     ~64k entries in there, shared with other entries (i.e., CPU). 
Therefore,
     using up to 32k memory ranges is fine. (if we ever need more than ~64k,

Do you see any issue if we increase the memory range count to 32K?

Thanks,
Sourabh Jain