Re: [PATCH RFC 00/35] mm: remove nth_page()

Jason Gunthorpe
2025-11-19T21:44:46Z

On Thu, Aug 21, 2025 at 10:06:26PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> As discussed recently with Linus, nth_page() is just nasty and we would
> like to remove it.
>
> To recap, the reason we currently need nth_page() within a folio is because
> on some kernel configs (SPARSEMEM without SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP), the
> memmap is allocated per memory section.
>
> While buddy allocations cannot cross memory section boundaries, hugetlb
> and dax folios can.
>
> So crossing a memory section means that "page++" could do the wrong thing.
> Instead, nth_page() on these problematic configs always goes from
> page->pfn, to the go from (++pfn)->page, which is rather nasty.
>
> Likely, many people have no idea when nth_page() is required and when
> it might be dropped.
>
> We refer to such problematic PFN ranges and "non-contiguous pages".
> If we only deal with "contiguous pages", there is not need for nth_page().
>
> Besides that "obvious" folio case, we might end up using nth_page()
> within CMA allocations (again, could span memory sections), and in
> one corner case (kfence) when processing memblock allocations (again,
> could span memory sections).

I browsed the patches and it looks great to me, thanks for doing this

Jason