Correctable memory errors are very common on servers with large amount of memory, and are corrected by ECC, but with two pain points to users: 1. Correction usually happens on the fly and adds latency overhead 2. Not-fully-proved theory states excessive correctable memory errors can develop into uncorrectable memory error.
Soft offline is kernel's additional solution for memory pages having (excessive) corrected memory errors. Impacted page is migrated to healthy page if it is in use, then the original page is discarded for any future use.
The actual policy on whether (and when) to soft offline should be maintained by userspace, especially in case of an 1G HugeTLB page. Soft-offline dissolves the HugeTLB page, either in-use or free, into chunks of 4K pages, reducing HugeTLB pool capacity by 1 hugepage. If userspace has not acknowledged such behavior, it may be surprised when later mmap hugepages MAP_FAILED due to lack of hugepages. In case of a transparent hugepage, it will be split into 4K pages as well; userspace will stop enjoying the transparent performance.
In addition, discarding the entire 1G HugeTLB page only because of corrected memory errors sounds very costly and kernel better not doing under the hood. But today there are at least 2 such cases: 1. GHES driver sees both GHES_SEV_CORRECTED and CPER_SEC_ERROR_THRESHOLD_EXCEEDED after parsing CPER. 2. RAS Correctable Errors Collector counts correctable errors per PFN and when the counter for a PFN reaches threshold In both cases, userspace has no control of the soft offline performed by kernel's memory failure recovery.
This patch series give userspace the control of softofflining any page: kernel only soft offlines raw page / transparent hugepage / HugeTLB hugepage if userspace has agreed to. The interface to userspace is a new sysctl called enable_soft_offline under /proc/sys/vm. By default enable_soft_line is 1 to preserve existing behavior in kernel.
Changelog
v1 => v2: * incorporate feedbacks from both Miaohe Lin linmiaohe@huawei.com and Jane Chu jane.chu@oracle.com. * make the switch to control all pages, instead of HugeTLB specific. * change the API from /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-${size}kB/softoffline_corrected_errors to /proc/sys/vm/enable_soft_offline. * minor update to test code. * update documentation of the user control API. * v2 is based on commit 83a7eefedc9b ("Linux 6.10-rc3").
Jiaqi Yan (3): mm/memory-failure: userspace controls soft-offlining pages selftest/mm: test enable_soft_offline behaviors docs: mm: add enable_soft_offline sysctl
Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst | 15 + mm/memory-failure.c | 16 ++ tools/testing/selftests/mm/.gitignore | 1 + tools/testing/selftests/mm/Makefile | 1 + .../selftests/mm/hugetlb-soft-offline.c | 258 ++++++++++++++++++ tools/testing/selftests/mm/run_vmtests.sh | 4 + 6 files changed, 295 insertions(+) create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/mm/hugetlb-soft-offline.c