Re: [PATCH v1 4/4] mm/mmu_gather: Store and process pages in contig ranges

[David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>]

On 04.12.23 13:26, Ryan Roberts wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Also, struct page (memmap) might not be always contiguous, using struct page
>>>> points to represent folio range might not give the result you want.
>>>> See nth_page() and folio_page_idx() in include/linux/mm.h.
>>>
>>> Is that true for pages within the same folio too? Or are all pages in a folio
>>> guarranteed contiguous? Perhaps I'm better off using pfn?
>>
>> folio_page_idx() says not all pages in a folio is guaranteed to be contiguous.
>> PFN might be a better choice.
> 
> Hi Zi, Matthew,
> 
> Zi made this comment a couple of months back that it is incorrect to assume that
> `struct page`s within a folio are (virtually) contiguous. I'm not sure if that's
> really the case though? I see other sites in the source that do page++ when
> iterating over a folio. e.g. smaps_account(), splice_folio_into_pipe(),
> __collapse_huge_page_copy(), etc.
> 
> Any chance someone could explain the rules?

With the vmemmap, they are contiguous. Without a vmemmap, but with 
sparsemem, we might end up allocating one memmap chunk per memory 
section (e.g., 128 MiB).

So, for example, a 1 GiB hugetlb page could cross multiple 128 MiB 
sections, and therefore, the memmap might not be virtually consecutive.


-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb