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* question on NUMA page migration
@ 2012-10-19 15:53 Rik van Riel
  2012-10-19 16:39 ` Peter Zijlstra
  2012-10-21  2:39 ` Ni zhan Chen
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: Rik van Riel @ 2012-10-19 15:53 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Peter Zijlstra
  Cc: Andrea Arcangeli, Ingo Molnar, Linux Memory Management List,
	Mel Gorman, Linux kernel Mailing List

Hi Andrea, Peter,

I have a question on page refcounting in your NUMA
page migration code.

In Peter's case, I wonder why you introduce a new
MIGRATE_FAULT migration mode. If the normal page
migration / compaction logic can do without taking
an extra reference count, why does your code need it?

In Andrea's case, we have a comment suggesting an
extra refcount is needed, immediately followed by
a put_page:

         /*
          * Pin the head subpage at least until the first
          * __isolate_lru_page succeeds (__isolate_lru_page pins it
          * again when it succeeds). If we unpin before
          * __isolate_lru_page successd, the page could be freed and
          * reallocated out from under us. Thus our previous checks on
          * the page, and the split_huge_page, would be worthless.
          *
          * We really only need to do this if "ret > 0" but it doesn't
          * hurt to do it unconditionally as nobody can reference
          * "page" anymore after this and so we can avoid an "if (ret >
          * 0)" branch here.
          */
         put_page(page);

This also confuses me.

If we do not need the extra refcount (and I do not
understand why NUMA migrate-on-fault needs one more
refcount than normal page migration), we can get
rid of the MIGRATE_FAULT mode.

If we do need the extra refcount, why is normal
page migration safe? :)

-- 
All rights reversed

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2012-10-21 12:31 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 11+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2012-10-19 15:53 question on NUMA page migration Rik van Riel
2012-10-19 16:39 ` Peter Zijlstra
2012-10-19 17:13   ` Rik van Riel
2012-10-19 17:53     ` Peter Zijlstra
2012-10-19 18:33       ` Rik van Riel
2012-10-20  1:23         ` Ingo Molnar
2012-10-20 16:02           ` Rik van Riel
2012-10-21 12:30             ` Ingo Molnar
2012-10-21  2:39 ` Ni zhan Chen
2012-10-21  2:40   ` Rik van Riel
2012-10-21 12:31     ` Ingo Molnar

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