Re: [PATCH v3 00/13] Remove device private pages from physical address space

Alistair Popple
2026-01-29T23:26:44Z

On 2026-01-30 at 00:49 +1100, "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@linux.alibaba.com> wrote...
> Hi, Jordan,
>
> Jordan Niethe <jniethe@nvidia.com> writes:
>
> > Introduction
> > ------------
> >
> > The existing design of device private memory imposes limitations which
> > render it non functional for certain systems and configurations - this
> > series removes those limitations. These issues are:
> >
> > 1) Limited available physical address space
> > 2) Conflicts with arch64 mm implementation
> >
> > Limited available address space
> > -------------------------------
> >
> > Device private memory is implemented by first reserving a region of the
> > physical address space. This is a problem. The physical address space is
> > not a resource that is directly under the kernel's control. Availability
> > of suitable physical address space is constrained by the underlying
> > hardware and firmware and may not always be available.
> >
> > Device private memory assumes that it will be able to reserve a device
> > memory sized chunk of physical address space. However, there is nothing
> > guaranteeing that this will succeed, and there a number of factors that
> > increase the likelihood of failure. We need to consider what else may
> > exist in the physical address space. It is observed that certain VM
> > configurations place very large PCI windows immediately after RAM. Large
> > enough that there is no physical address space available at all for
> > device private memory. This is more likely to occur on 43 bit physical
> > width systems which have less physical address space.
> >
> > The fundamental issue is the physical address space is not a resource
> > the kernel can rely on being to allocate from at will.
> >
> > aarch64 issues
> > --------------
> >
> > The current device private memory implementation has further issues on
> > aarch64. On aarch64, vmemmap is sized to cover the ram only. Adding
> > device private pages to the linear map then means that for device
> > private page, pfn_to_page() will read beyond the end of vmemmap region
> > leading to potential memory corruption. This means that device private
> > memory does not work reliably on aarch64 [0].
> >
> > New implementation
> > ------------------
> >
> > This series changes device private memory so that it does not require
> > allocation of physical address space and these problems are avoided.
> > Instead of using the physical address space, we introduce a "device
> > private address space" and allocate from there.
> >
> > A consequence of placing the device private pages outside of the
> > physical address space is that they no longer have a PFN. However, it is
> > still necessary to be able to look up a corresponding device private
> > page from a device private PTE entry, which means that we still require
> > some way to index into this device private address space. Instead of a
> > PFN, device private pages use an offset into this device private address
> > space to look up device private struct pages.
> >
> > The problem that then needs to be addressed is how to avoid confusing
> > these device private offsets with PFNs. It is the limited usage
> > of the device private pages themselves which make this possible. A
> > device private page is only used for userspace mappings, we do not need
> > to be concerned with them being used within the mm more broadly. This
> > means that the only way that the core kernel looks up these pages is via
> > the page table, where their PTE already indicates if they refer to a
> > device private page via their swap type, e.g. SWP_DEVICE_WRITE. We can
> > use this information to determine if the PTE contains a PFN which should
> > be looked up in the page map, or a device private offset which should be
> > looked up elsewhere.
> >
> > This applies when we are creating PTE entries for device private pages -
> > because they have their own type there are already must be handled
> > separately, so it is a small step to convert them to a device private
> > PFN now too.
> >
> > The first part of the series updates callers where device private
> > offsets might now be encountered to track this extra state.
> >
> > The last patch contains the bulk of the work where we change how we
> > convert between device private pages to device private offsets and then
> > use a new interface for allocating device private pages without the need
> > for reserving physical address space.
> >
> > By removing the device private pages from the physical address space,
> > this series also opens up the possibility to moving away from tracking
> > device private memory using struct pages in the future. This is
> > desirable as on systems with large amounts of memory these device
> > private struct pages use a signifiant amount of memory and take a
> > significant amount of time to initialize.
>
> Now device private pages are quite different from other pages, even in a
> separate address pace. IMHO, it may be better to make that as explicit
> as possible. For example, is it a good idea to put them in its own
> zone, like ZONE_DEVICE_PRIVATE? It appears not natural to put pages
> from different address spaces into one zone. And, this may make them
> easier to be distinguished from other pages.

All pages in ZONE_DEVICE are quite different from each other in their various
different and type specifc ways and often need to be treated as such. The
purpose of ZONE_DEVICE (at least as I understand it) is primarily to isolate
these pages from any generic kernel allocators. So it's unclear to me what
advantage a new zone would provide - we already have pgmap->type and functions
to distinguish different types of zone device page and the existing ZONE_DEVICE
assignment already provides the isolation from generic kernel code that we need.

- Alistair

> ---
> Best Regards,
> Huang, Ying