Re: [RFC] Changing COW detection to be memory hotplug friendly

[Hugh Dickins]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 08:19:47PM +0000, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> > 
> > get_user_pages broke COW in advance of the I/O.  The reason for
> > subsequent COW if the page gets unmapped is precisely because
> > can_share_swap_page used page_count to judge exclusivity, and
> > get_user_pages has bumped that up, so the page appears (in danger
> > of being) non-exclusive when actually it is exclusive.  By changing
> > can_share_swap_page to use page_mapcount, that frustration vanishes.
> 
> What if a second thread does a fork() while the rawio is in progress?
> The page will be again no shareable, and if you unmap it the rawio will
> be currupt if the thread that executed the fork while the I/O is in
> progress writes to a part of the page again after it has been unmapped
> (obviously the part of the page that isn't under read-rawio, rawio works
> with the hardblocksize, not on the whole page). 

I think there's no difference here between the two techniques.

With the new can_share_swap_page, yes, "page_swapcount" goes up with
the fork, the page will be judged non-exclusive, a user write to
another part of the page will replace it by a copy page, and it's
undefined how much of the I/O will be captured in the copy.

But even with the old can_share_swap_page, and try_to_unmap_one
refusing to unmap the page, copy_page_range's COW checking would
still remove write permission from the pte of an anonymous
page, so a user write to another part of the page would find
raised page_count and replace it by a copy page: same behaviour.

And it's fine for the behaviour to be somewhat undefined in this
peculiar case: the important thing is just that the page must not
be freed and reused while I/O occurs, hence get_user_page raising
the page_count - which I'm _not_ proposing to change!

Hugh
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