Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] Discuss least bad options for resolving longterm-GUP usage by RDMA

[John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com>]

On 2/11/19 10:19 AM, Ira Weiny wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 11:06:54AM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 09:22:58AM -0800, Dan Williams wrote:
[...]
> John's patches will indicate to the FS that the page is gup pinned.  But they
> will not indicate longterm vs not "shorterm".  A shortterm pin could be handled
> as a "real truncate".  So, are we back to needing a longterm "bit" in struct
> page to indicate a longterm pin and allow the FS to perform this "virtual
> write" after truncate?
> 
> Or is it safe to consider all gup pinned pages this way?
> 
> Ira
> 

I mentioned this in another thread, but I'm not great at email threading. :)
Anyway, it seems better to just drop the entire "longterm" concept from the 
internal APIs, and just deal in "it's either gup-pinned *at the moment*, or 
it's not". And let the filesystem respond appropriately. So for a pinned page 
that hits clear_page_dirty_for_io or whatever else care about pinned pages:

-- fire mmu notifiers, revoke leases, generally do everything as if it were a
long term gup pin

-- if it's long term, then you've taken the right actions.

-- if the pin really is short term, everything works great anyway.


The only way that breaks is if longterm pins imply an irreversible action, such
as blocking and waiting in a way that you can't back out of or get interrupted
out of. And the design doesn't seem to be going in that direction, right?

thanks,
-- 
John Hubbard
NVIDIA