Re: [PATCH v2] RDMA/umem: minor bug fix and cleanup in error handling paths

John Hubbard
2019-03-05T20:10:03Z

On 3/4/19 12:13 PM, Ira Weiny wrote:
[snip]
>> And this reminds me that I have a problem to solve nearby: get_user_pages
>> on huge pages increments the page->_refcount *for each tail page* as well.
>> That's a minor problem for my put_user_page()
>> patchset, because my approach so far assumed that I could just change us
>> over to:
>>
>> get_user_page(): increments page->_refcount by a large amount (1024)
>>
>> put_user_page(): decrements page->_refcount by a large amount (1024)
>>
>> ...and just stop doing the odd (to me) technique of incrementing once for
>> each tail page. I cannot see any reason why that's actually required, as
>> opposed to just "raise the page->_refcount enough to avoid losing the head
>> page too soon".
>
> What about splitting a huge page?
>
> From Documention/vm/transhuge.rst
>
> <quoute>
> split_huge_page internally has to distribute the refcounts in the head
> page to the tail pages before clearing all PG_head/tail bits from the page
> structures. It can be done easily for refcounts taken by page table
> entries. But we don't have enough information on how to distribute any
> additional pins (i.e. from get_user_pages). split_huge_page() fails any
> requests to split pinned huge page: it expects page count to be equal to
> sum of mapcount of all sub-pages plus one (split_huge_page caller must
> have reference for head page).
> </quote>
>

heh, so in the end, split_huge_page just needs enough information to say
"no" for gup pages. So as long as page->_refcount avoids one particular
value, the code keeps working. :)

> FWIW, I'm not sure why it needs to "store" the reference in the head page for
> this. I don't see any check to make sure the ref has been "stored" but I'm not
> really familiar with the compound page code yet.
>
> Ira
>

Thanks for peeking at this, I'll look deeper too.

thanks,
--
John Hubbard
NVIDIA