Re: [patch 2] mm: speculative get_page

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> SetPageFreeing is only done in shrink_list(), so other pages in the
>> buddy bitmaps and/or pagecache pages freed by other methods may not

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 10:03:00AM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> It is also done by remove_exclusive_swap_page, although that hunk
> leaked into a later patch (#5), sorry.
> Other methods (eg truncate) don't seem to have an atomicity guarantee
> anyway - ie. it is valid to pick up a reference on a page that is
> just about to get truncated. PageFreeing is only used when some code
> is making an assumption about the number of users of the page.

tmpfs


William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> be found by this. There's also likely trouble with higher-order pages.

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 10:03:00AM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> There isn't because higher order pages aren't used for pagecache.

hugetlbfs


William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> page != *pagep won't be reliably tripped unless the pagecache
>> modification has the appropriate memory barriers.

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 10:03:00AM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> There are appropriate memory barriers: the radix tree is
> modified uner the rwlock/spinlock, and this function has
> a memory barrier before testing page != *pagep.

Someone else deal with this (paulus? anton? other arch maintainers?).


William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> The lockless radix tree lookups are a harder problem than this, and
>> the implementation didn't look promising. I have other problems to deal
>> with so I'm not going to go very far into this.

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 10:03:00AM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> What's wrong with the lockless radix tree lookups?

The above is as much as I wanted to go into it. I need to direct my
capacity for the grunt work of devising adversary arguments elsewhere.


William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> While I agree that locklessness is the right direction for the
>> pagecache to go, this RFC seems to have too far to go to use it to
>> conclude anything about the subject.

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 10:03:00AM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> You don't seem to have looked enough to conclude anything about it.

You requested comments. I made some.

Anyhow, my review has not been comprehensive. I stopped after the first
few things I found that needed fixing. If others could deal with the
rest of this, I'd be much obliged.


-- wli