Subject: non-contiguous physical memory

From: [email-masked] (Yaron Presente)
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 15:46:43 +0300

Hi all,
I'm running montavista linux (2.4.18_mvl30-malta-mips_fp_le) on a board 
that has 2 memory banks of physical memory.
1. 32MB from physical address 0x00000000
2. 16MB from physical address 0x20000000

Currently I can only access the first bank (by add_memory_region(0, 32 
<< 20, BOOT_MEM_RAM) in prom_init() ).
I tried the obvious solution of adding another region at 0x20000000 
(add_memory_region(0x20000000, 16 << 20, BOOT_MEM_RAM))
but that didn't seem to work. I've also tried to add a BOOT_MEM_RESERVED 
region in between the regions in order to create a seemingly contiguous 
memory, with no success.
My questions are:
Is it possible to access the second bank as well under MIPS ?
Is there a way to define a "hole" in the physical memory?
Do I have to use CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM ? is it fully supported ?
Thanks for your help,

-- 
Yaron Presente
MRV International
Direct   : 972-4-9936237
Fax      : 972-4-9890564
Email   : [email-masked]
www.mrv.com

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From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 01:31:30 +0200

> Do I have to use CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM ? is it fully supported ?

Your initial approach was nearly right - you can solve the problem of
holes in the memory map as long as they're small enough by only adding
the available regions with add_memory_region().  Typically uses for
this are small holes due to memory in use by firmware, for example.

Now, in your case the whole isn't small.  In fact, with 480MB it's big ;-)
What Linux will try to do is to allocate the mem_map array for the
entire memory range from 0x0 - 0x21000000, that's 528MB.  mem_map contains
one page per 4k page; each entry is 64 bytes in size for 32-bit kernels
so that makes a total size for mem_map[] of 8.25MB of which just 768kB are
actually being used.

Just to make life a little bit more misserable memory 32-bit kernels can
only use memory above the 512MB boundary as highmem.

CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM can solve this problem - but Linux/MIPS really doesn't
much an attempt to make that easy to use.  Right now only a single MIPS
system is using CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM and that system is using it in
combination with CONFIG_NUMA which is quite an additional complication.

With CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM there will be no more mem_map[] array. Instead
there will be one such array for each memory region which means you'll
loose a bit of performance due to additional complexity but you'll save
all the wasted memory.

  Ralf

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From: [email-masked] (Yaron Presente)
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2004 11:06:10 +0300

Ralf,
Thanks for your help.
We've found out that the board can address more then 32MB in the lower 
bank, so for simplicity reasons,
I think that we just won't use the higher bank.
Yaron

Ralf Baechle wrote:

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