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arm64: kdump: simplify the reservation behaviour of crashkernel=,high

Pingfan Liu requested to merge piliu/centos-stream-9:arm64_crashkernel_high into main

JIRA: https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-8993

Main issue: On arm64, reservation for 'crashkernel=xM,high' is taken by searching for suitable memory region top down. If the 'xM' of crashkernel high memory is reserved from high memory successfully, it will try to reserve crashkernel low memory later accoringly. Otherwise, it will try to search
low memory area for the 'xM' suitable region. Please see the details in Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt.

While we observed an unexpected case where a reserved region crosses the high and low meomry boundary. E.g on a system with 4G as low memory end, user added the kernel parameters like: 'crashkernel=512M,high', it could finally have [4G-126M, 4G+386M], [1G, 1G+128M] regions in running kernel. The crashkernel high region crossing low and high memory boundary will bring
issues.

  1. For crashkernel=x,high, if getting crashkernel high region across low and high memory boundary, then user will see two memory regions in low memory, and one memory region in high memory. The two crashkernel low memory regions are confusing as shown in above example.

  2. If people explicityly specify "crashkernel=x,high crashkernel=y,low" and y <= 128M, when crashkernel high region crosses low and high memory boundary and the part of crashkernel high reservation below boundary is bigger than y, the expected crahskernel low reservation will be skipped. But the expected crashkernel high reservation is shrank and could not satisfy user space requirement.

  3. The crossing boundary behaviour of crahskernel high reservation is different than x86 arch. On x86_64, the low memory end is 4G fixedly, and the memory near 4G is reserved by system, e.g for mapping firmware, pci mapping, so the crashkernel reservation crossing boundary never happens. From distros point of view, this brings inconsistency and confusion. Users need to dig into x86 and arm64 system details to find out why.

For kernel itself, the impact of issue 3) could be slight. While issue

  1. and 2) cause actual impact because it brings obscure semantics and behaviour to crashkernel=,high reservation.

Here, for crashkernel=xM,high, search the high memory for the suitable region only in high memory. If failed, try reserving the suitable region only in low memory. Like this, the crashkernel high region will only exist in high memory, and crashkernel low region only exists in low memory. The reservation behaviour for crashkernel=,high is clearer and simpler.

Signed-off-by: Pingfan Liu piliu@redhat.com

Edited by Pingfan Liu

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