Kernel Memblocks
 

My understanding :

Linux splits a memory node into memory banks. The banks are then logically divided into memory zones.

Question :

There is something called as memory blocks that are found in the bootup code (functions like memblock_init()). Can someone clear me what are these memory blocks and the relationship between memory banks and memory blocks.

Regards,
Prabagaran

hi,
as far as i know it's really the boot loader that figures out the physical memory layout and passes that to the kernel.
each memory bank -- that is physical memory -- is a "node".
a bank or node is memory attached to a specific memory bus.
more than one bank or node would be like a NUMA setup or something.
each node is divided into 3 blocks called "zones".

i think those things you see in memblock exist to allocate memory
before the zone allocator is up and running.
basically i think the whole node is reserved an then later freed to the zone allocator.

again this stuff is kind of architecture specific and has changed over time.