SPARSEMEM memory model patches

After long testing outside -mm we believe that the SPARSEMEM patches are ready for wider testing, please consider for -mm.

SPARSEMEM essentially is a replacement for DISCONTIGMEM providing support for non-contigious memory but with the advantage of handling both inter- and intra-node memory holes. The goal of the implementation was to design a clean memory memory model covering the needs of both UMA and NUMA discontigouos memory layouts whilst providing a basis for hotplug. This should allow us to consolidate the implementation of various "discontiguous" memory model whilst trying to fix its short comings. Ultimatly it should allow us to remove DISCONTIGMEM.

Following this mail are 6 patches which provide SPARSEMEM for i386, they introduce SPARSEMEM as an alternative to DISCONTIGMEM without removing it:

[1/6] generify early_pfn_to_nid
[2/6] generify memory present
[3/6] sparsemem memory model
[4/6] sparsemem memory model for i386
[5/6] sparsemem swiss cheese numa layouts
[6/6] sparsemem hotplug base

These patches have been compiled, booted and tested on 2.6.12-rc2 (plus the -mm patches listed below). They have been compile and boot tested against 2.6.12-rc3-mm2. They do assume a number of patches already incorporated into -mm including the latest configuration updates from Dave Hansen <[email protected]>.

remove-non-discontig-use-of-pgdat-node_mem_map.patch resubmit-sparsemem-base-early_pfn_to_nid-works-before-sparse-is-initialized.patch resubmit-sparsemem-base-simple-numa-remap-space-allocator.patch resubmit-sparsemem-base-reorganize-page-flags-bit-operations.patch resubmit-sparsemem-base-teach-discontig-about-sparse-ranges.patch create-mm-kconfig-for-arch-independent-memory-options.patch make-each-arch-use-mm-kconfig.patch update-all-defconfigs-for-arch_discontigmem_enable.patch introduce-new-kconfig-option-for-numa-or-discontig.patch sparsemem-fix-minor-defaults-issue-in-mm-kconfig.patch mm-kconfig-kill-unused-arch_flatmem_disable.patch mm-kconfig-hide-memory-model-selection-menu.patch

Comments/feedback appreciated.

-apw
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