Re: [PATCH] mm: introduce for_each_vma helpers

Andrew Morton
2014-08-13T21:08:04Z

On Tue, 12 Aug 2014 16:46:48 -0700 Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2014-08-13 at 00:52 +0300, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 10:45:23AM -0700, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:
> > > The most common way of iterating through the list of vmas, is via:
> > > for (vma = mm->mmap; vma; vma = vma->vm_next)
> > >
> > > This patch replaces this logic with a new for_each_vma(vma) helper,
> > > which 1) encapsulates this logic, and 2) make it easier to read.
> >
> > Why does it need to be encapsulated?
> > Do you have problem with reading plain for()?
> >
> > Your for_each_vma(vma) assumes "mm" from the scope. This can be confusing
> > for reader: whether it uses "mm" from the scope or "current->mm". This
> > will lead to very hard to find bug one day.
>
> I think its fairly obvious to see where the mm is coming from -- the
> helpers *do not* necessarily use current, it uses whatever mm was
> already there in the first place. I have not changed anything related to
> this from the callers.

It is a bit of a hand-grenade for those (rare) situations where code is
dealing with other-tasks-mm. It's simple enough to add an `mm' arg?

> The only related change I can think of, is for some callers that do:
>
> for (vma = current->mm->mmap; vma != NULL; vma = vma->vm_next)
>
> So we just add a local mm from current->mm and replace the for() with
> for_each_vma(). I don't see anything particularly ambiguous with that.

Adding a local to support a macro which secretly uses that local is
pretty nasty.

Overall, I'm not really sure that

- for (vma = mm->mmap; vma; vma = vma->vm_next) {
+ for_each_vma(mm, vma) {

is much of an improvement. I'll wait to see what others think...