Re: [PATCH 1/9] mm: Introduce new vm_insert_range API

Matthew Wilcox
2018-11-21T12:36:04Z

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 04:19:11AM -0700, William Kucharski wrote:
> Could you add a line to the description explicitly stating that a failure
> to insert any page in the range will fail the entire routine, something
> like:
>
> > * This allows drivers to insert range of kernel pages they've allocated
> > * into a user vma. This is a generic function which drivers can use
> > * rather than using their own way of mapping range of kernel pages into
> > * user vma.
> > *
> > * A failure to insert any page in the range will fail the call as a whole.
>
> It's obvious when reading the code, but it would be self-documenting to
> state it outright.

It's probably better to be more explicit and answer Randy's question:

* If we fail to insert any page into the vma, the function will return
* immediately leaving any previously-inserted pages present. Callers
* from the mmap handler may immediately return the error as their
* caller will destroy the vma, removing any successfully-inserted pages.
* Other callers should make their own arrangements for calling unmap_region().

Although unmap_region() is static so there clearly isn't any code in the
kernel today other than in mmap handlers (or fault handlers) that needs to
insert pages into a VMA.