Re: [PATCH v2] mm: allow deferred page init for vmemmap only

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Fri 11-05-18 10:17:55, Pavel Tatashin wrote:
> > Thanks that helped me to see the problem. On the other hand isn't this a
> > bit of an overkill? AFAICS this affects only NEED_PER_CPU_KM which is !SMP
> > and DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT makes only very limited sense on UP,
> > right?
> 
> > Or do we have more such places?
> 
> I do not know other places, but my worry is that trap_init() is arch
> specific and we cannot guarantee that arches won't do virt to phys in
> trap_init() in other places. Therefore, I think a proper fix is simply
> allow DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT when it is safe to do virt to phys without
> accessing struct pages, which is with SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP.

You are now disabling a potentially useful feature to SPARSEMEM users
without having any evidence that they do suffer from the issue which is
kinda sad. Especially when the only known offender is a UP pcp allocator
implementation.

I will not insist of course but it seems like your fix doesn't really
prevent virt_to_page or other direct page access either.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs