From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Christoph Hellwig Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm: set PG_dma_pinned on get_user_pages*() Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:56:50 -0700 Message-ID: <20180618075650.GA7300@infradead.org> References: <20180617012510.20139-1-jhubbard@nvidia.com> <20180617012510.20139-3-jhubbard@nvidia.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20180617012510.20139-3-jhubbard@nvidia.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: john.hubbard@gmail.com Cc: Matthew Wilcox , Michal Hocko , Christopher Lameter , Jason Gunthorpe , Dan Williams , Jan Kara , linux-mm@kvack.org, LKML , linux-rdma , John Hubbard List-Id: linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 06:25:10PM -0700, john.hubbard@gmail.com wrote: > From: John Hubbard > > This fixes a few problems that come up when using devices (NICs, GPUs, > for example) that want to have direct access to a chunk of system (CPU) > memory, so that they can DMA to/from that memory. Problems [1] come up > if that memory is backed by persistence storage; for example, an ext4 > file system. I've been working on several customer bugs that are hitting > this, and this patchset fixes those bugs. What happens if we do get_user_page from two different threads or even processes on the same page? As far as I can tell from your patch the first one finishing the page will clear the bit and then we are back to no protection. Note that you can reproduce such a condition trivially using direct I/O reads or writes.