Re: Cannot boot PVH dom0 with big initrd

[Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2026 at 09:11:29AM +0100, Jan Beulich wrote:
> On 13.02.2026 16:56, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 13, 2026 at 09:56:42AM +0100, Jan Beulich wrote:
> >> On 13.02.2026 05:02, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> After fixing the xhci crash, I hit another issue - booting with 236MB
> >>> initrd doesn't work, I get:
> >>>
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.151856] *** Building a PVH Dom0 ***
> >>>     ...
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.593940] Unable to allocate memory with order 0!
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.597110] Failed to setup Dom0 physical memory map
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.599884] 
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.602482] ****************************************
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.605272] Panic on CPU 0:
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.607928] Could not construct d0
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.610692] ****************************************
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.613463] 
> >>>     (XEN) [    3.616035] Reboot in five seconds...
> >>>     (XEN) [    8.626565] Resetting with ACPI MEMORY or I/O RESET_REG.
> >>>
> >>> Full console log: 
> >>> https://gist.github.com/marmarek/c9dbc87bf07b76f2899781755762f565
> >>>
> >>> If I skip initrd, then it boots just fine (but dom0 is not happy about
> >>> that). 164MB initrd failed too, but 13MB started ok.
> >>> Just in case, I tried skipping XHCI console, but it didn't change
> >>> anything.
> >>>
> >>> Host has 16GB of memory, and there is no dom0_mem= parameter. Xen is
> >>> started from GRUB, using MB2+EFI.
> >>
> >> Hmm, yes, there's an ordering issue: Of course we free initrd space (as 
> >> used
> >> for passing from the boot loader to Xen) only after copying to the 
> >> designated
> >> guest area. Yet dom0_compute_nr_pages(), intentionally, includes the space 
> >> in
> >> its calculation (adding initial_images_nrpages()'s return value). PV Dom0
> >> isn't affected because to load huge initrd there, the kernel has to request
> >> the initrd to not be mapped into the initial allocation.
> > 
> > Right, on PV dom0 we do not copy the image to a new set of pages, we
> > simply assign the pages where the initrd resides to the domain.  We
> > can't populate those pages in the p2m as-is, otherwise we would
> > shatter super pages.
> > 
> > I think the fix below should do it, it's likely the best we can do.
> 
> That's at best a workaround imo. We definitely can do better, and the bigger
> the initrd, the more important it may be that we actually do.

See the second patch I gave to Marek.  That one is slightly better by
accounting for the initial images space as part of the reserved space.

> One option may
> be to similarly use the pages directly (i.e. by assigning rather than
> copying), accepting that we may not be able to use large page mappings then
> for the respective GFN range.

Hm, there's always going to be a trade-off.  I think I would prefer
having 1G pages in the p2m, rather than a bit more memory due to
direct adding the initrd into the p2m.

Thanks, Roger.