Re: [PATCH v3 0/7] Split a folio to any lower order folios

Hugh Dickins
2023-04-16T18:12:03Z

On Tue, 4 Apr 2023, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Apr 2023 16:18:32 -0400 Zi Yan <zi.yan@sent.com> wrote:
>
> > File folio supports any order and people would like to support flexible orders
> > for anonymous folio[1] too. Currently, split_huge_page() only splits a huge
> > page to order-0 pages, but splitting to orders higher than 0 is also useful.
> > This patchset adds support for splitting a huge page to any lower order pages
> > and uses it during file folio truncate operations.
>
> This series (and its v1 & v2) don't appear to have much in the way of
> detailed review. As it's at v3 and has been fairly stable I'll queue
> it up for some testing now, but I do ask that some reviewers go through
> it please.

Andrew, please don't let this series drift into 6.4-rc1.

I've seen a bug or two (I'll point out in response to those patches),
but overall I don't see what the justification for the series is: done
because it could be done, it seems to me, but liable to add surprises.

The cover letter says "splitting to orders higher than 0 is also useful",
but it's not clear why; and the infrastructure provided seems unsuited
to the one use provided - I'll say more on that truncation patch.

Thanks,
Hugh