memory-hotplug: add automatic onlining policy for the newly added memory

Currently, all newly added memory blocks remain in 'offline' state
unless someone onlines them, some linux distributions carry special udev
rules like:

  SUBSYSTEM=="memory", ACTION=="add", ATTR{state}=="offline", ATTR{state}="online"

to make this happen automatically.  This is not a great solution for
virtual machines where memory hotplug is being used to address high
memory pressure situations as such onlining is slow and a userspace
process doing this (udev) has a chance of being killed by the OOM killer
as it will probably require to allocate some memory.

Introduce default policy for the newly added memory blocks in
/sys/devices/system/memory/auto_online_blocks file with two possible
values: "offline" which preserves the current behavior and "online"
which causes all newly added memory blocks to go online as soon as
they're added.  The default is "offline".

Signed-off-by: Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Daniel Kiper <daniel.kiper@oracle.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Daniel Kiper <daniel.kiper@oracle.com>
Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Cc: Tang Chen <tangchen@cn.fujitsu.com>
Cc: David Vrabel <david.vrabel@citrix.com>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
Cc: Xishi Qiu <qiuxishi@huawei.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: "K. Y. Srinivasan" <kys@microsoft.com>
Cc: Igor Mammedov <imammedo@redhat.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay@vrfy.org>
Cc: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Cc: Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrovsky@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/memory-hotplug.txt b/Documentation/memory-hotplug.txt
index ce2cfcf35c27..443f4b44ad97 100644
--- a/Documentation/memory-hotplug.txt
+++ b/Documentation/memory-hotplug.txt
@@ -256,10 +256,27 @@ If the memory block is offline, you'll read "offline".
 
 5.2. How to online memory
 ------------
-Even if the memory is hot-added, it is not at ready-to-use state.
-For using newly added memory, you have to "online" the memory block.
+When the memory is hot-added, the kernel decides whether or not to "online"
+it according to the policy which can be read from "auto_online_blocks" file:
 
-For onlining, you have to write "online" to the memory block's state file as:
+% cat /sys/devices/system/memory/auto_online_blocks
+
+The default is "offline" which means the newly added memory is not in a
+ready-to-use state and you have to "online" the newly added memory blocks
+manually. Automatic onlining can be requested by writing "online" to
+"auto_online_blocks" file:
+
+% echo online > /sys/devices/system/memory/auto_online_blocks
+
+This sets a global policy and impacts all memory blocks that will subsequently
+be hotplugged. Currently offline blocks keep their state. It is possible, under
+certain circumstances, that some memory blocks will be added but will fail to
+online. User space tools can check their "state" files
+(/sys/devices/system/memory/memoryXXX/state) and try to online them manually.
+
+If the automatic onlining wasn't requested, failed, or some memory block was
+offlined it is possible to change the individual block's state by writing to the
+"state" file:
 
 % echo online > /sys/devices/system/memory/memoryXXX/state