Re: [PATCH v6 00/13] Remove device private pages from physical address space

David Hildenbrand (Arm)
2026-03-18T08:44:36Z

On 3/17/26 02:47, Alistair Popple wrote:
> On 2026-03-07 at 03:16 +1100, "David Hildenbrand (Arm)" <david@kernel.org> wrote...
>> On 2/2/26 12:36, Jordan Niethe wrote:
>>> Introduction
>>> ------------
>>>
>>> The existing design of device private memory imposes limitations which
>>> render it non functional for certain systems and configurations where
>>> the physical address space is limited.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> I now went through all of the patches (skimming a bit over some parts
>> that need splitting or rework).
>
> Thanks David for taking the time to do a thorough review. I will let Jordan
> respond to most of the comments but wanted to add some of my own as I helped
> with the initial idea.
>
>> In general, a noble goal and a reasonable approach.
>>
>> But I get the sense that we are just hacking in yet another zone-device
>> thing. This series certainly makes core-mm more complicated. I provided
>> some inputs on how to make some things less hacky, and will provide
>> further input as you move forward.
>
> I disagree - this isn't hacking in another/new zone-device thing it is cleaning
> up/reworking a pre-existing zone-device thing (DEVICE_PRIVATE pages). My initial
> hope was it wouldn't actually involve too much churn on the core-mm side.

... and there is quite some.

stuff like make_readable_exclusive_migration_entry_from_page() must be
reworked.

Maybe after some reworks it will no longer look like a hack.

Right now it does.

>
> It seems that didn't work quite as well as hoped as there are a few places in
> core-mm where we use raw pfns without actually accessing them rather than using
> the page/folio. Notably page_vma_mapped in patch 5.

Yes. I provided ideas on how to minimize the impact.

Again, maybe if done right it will be okay-ish.

It will likely still be error prone, but I have no idea how on earth we
could possible catch reliably for an "unsigned long" pfn whether it is a
PFN (it's right there in the name ...) or something completely different.

We don't want another pfn_t, it would be too much churn to convert most
of MM.

>
> But overall this is about replacing pfn_to_page()/page_to_pfn() with
> device-private specific variants, as callers *must* already know when they
> are dealing with a device-private pfn and treat it specially today (whether
> explicitly or implicitly). Callers/callees already can't just treat a
> device-private pfn normally as accessing the pfn will cause machine checks and
> the associated page is a zone-device page so doesn't behave like a normal struct
> page.
>
>> We really have to minimize the impact, otherwise we'll just keep
>> breaking stuff all the time when we forget a single test for
>> device-private pages in one magical path.
>
> As noted above this is already the case - all paths whether explicitly or
> implicitly (or just fogotten ... hard to tell) need to consider device-private
> pages and possibly treat them differently. Even today some magical path that
> somehow gets a device-private pfn/page and tries to use it as a normal page/pfn
> will probably break as they don't actually correspond to physical addresses that
> actually exist and the struct pages are special.

Well, so far a PFN is a PFN, and when you actually have a *page* (after
pfn_to_page() etc) you can just test for these cases.

The page is actually sufficient to make a decision.

With a PFN you have to carry auxiliary information.

>
> So any core-mm churn is really just making this more explicit, but this series
> doesn't add any new requirements.

Again, maybe it can be done in a better way. I did not enjoy some of the
code changes I was reading.

>
> My bigger aim here is to use this as a stepping stone to removing device-private
> pages as they just contain a bunch of redundant information from a device driver
> perspective that introduces a lot of metadata management overhead.
>
>> I am not 100% sure how much the additional tests for device-private
>> pages all over the place will cost us. At least it can get compiled out,
>> but most distros will just always have it compiled in.
>
> I didn't notice too many extra checks outside of the migration entry path. But
> if perf is a concern there I think we could move those checks to device-private
> specific paths. From memory Jordan did this more as a convenience. Will go look
> a bit deeper for any other checks we might have added.
I meant in stuff like page_vma_mapped. Probably not the hottest path,
and maybe the impact can be reduced by reworking it.

--
Cheers,

David