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Resecting "options UVM_HOTPLUG"
Hi,
After some discussion with Jason, and re-reading the code and its
current state in code, I've come to the conclusion that it's in the
interest of brevity to remove everything in sys/kern/ and sys/uvm/ which
implement the "dynamic" part of uvm_hotplug(9).
The top two reasons for this in my mind are:
1) There are no current users of the uvm_hotplug(9) KPI - balloon(9)
uses it, but the unplug is unstable (wasn't able to debug this) and
is thus disabled by default.
2) In order to do unplug without a balloon(9) like mechanism (eg: on
native), there's a lot more state management code needed within
uvm(9) - to make sure that RAM segments being unplugged have no
machine references (eg: pmap related, pointers from inactive page
tables, TLB pointers, etc. etc. )
This is a lot of per-architecture work, and there doesn't seem to be
much demand for this feature (at least I haven't seen any comment
related to this as a usecase).
I believe that the project has had three useful purposes:
1) Demonstrated NetBSD code discipline - such a core part of the kernel
code was developed entirely in userspace prior to integration - and
due to the cross-compilable toolchain - it was done on Windows by
fox@!
2) The re-org forced better modularisation in the relevant
uvm/uvm_*.[hc] - ensuring even cleaner interfaces.
3) Demonstrated how TDD can reduce the pain of software dev. See:
https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/santhosh/2017_AsiaBSDCon/ABC2017-P8B-uvm_hotplug-paper.pdf
If there's no specific objection to this I'll be working with Jason to
help make this is as painless as possible.
Many Thanks!
--
MattC/(~cherry)
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