Re: [PATCH 4/5] mm: Do early cow for pinned pages during fork() for ptes

Jann Horn
2020-09-21T22:28:06Z

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 12:18 AM John Hubbard <jhubbard@nvidia.com> wrote:
> On 9/21/20 2:55 PM, Jann Horn wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 11:20 PM Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com> wrote:
> ...
> > I dislike the whole pin_user_pages() concept because (as far as I
> > understand) it fundamentally tries to fix a problem in the subset of
> > cases that are more likely to occur in practice (long-term pins
> > overlapping with things like writeback), and ignores the rarer cases
> > ("short-term" GUP).
> >
>
> Well, no, that's not really fair. pin_user_pages() provides a key
> prerequisite to fixing *all* of the bugs in that area, not just a
> subset. The 5 cases in Documentation/core-api/pin_user_pages.rst cover
> this pretty well. Or if they don't, let me know and I'll have another
> pass at it.
>
> The case for a "pin count" that is (logically) separate from a
> page->_refcount is real, and it fixes real problems. An elevated
> refcount can be caused by a lot of things, but it can normally be waited
> for and/or retried. The FOLL_PIN pages cannot.
>
> Of course, a valid remaining criticism of the situation is, "why not
> just *always* mark any of these pages as "dma-pinned"? In other words,
> why even have a separate gup/pup API? And in fact, perhaps eventually
> we'll just get rid of the get_user_pages*() side of it. But the pin
> count will need to remain, in order to discern between DMA pins and
> temporary refcount boosts.

Ah... the documentation you linked implies that FOLL_WRITE should more
or less imply FOLL_PIN? I didn't realize that.

Whoops, and actually, process_vm_writev() does use FOLL_PIN
already, and I just grepped the code the wrong way.

Thanks for the enlightenment; I take back everything I said.