Re: [PATCH] /proc/kpagecount: return 0 for special pages that are never mapped

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2018 at 05:18:32PM -0800, anthony.yznaga@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> On 12/04/2018 04:48 PM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 04, 2018 at 02:45:26PM -0800, Anthony Yznaga wrote:
> >> +static inline int page_has_type(struct page *page)
> >> +{
> >> +	return (PageType(page, 0) &&
> >> +	       ((page->page_type & PAGE_TYPE_ALL) != PAGE_TYPE_ALL));
> >> +}
> >> +
> >
> > I think this is a bit complex, and a bit of a pain to update as we add
> > new page types.  How about this?
> >
> > 	return (int)page_type < -128;
> >
> > (I'm open to appropriate #defines to make this more obvious that it's ~0x7F)
> 
> I thought about having this:
> 
> #define PAGE_TYPE_END    0xffffff80
> 
> static int inline page_has_type(struct page *page)
> {
>     return page->page_type > PAGE_TYPE_BASE &&
>            page->page_type < PAGE_TYPE_END;
> }
> 
> But I opted for the additional complexity to avoid more false-positives from
> possibly corrupted values.  I'm certainly fine with a simple approach, though.

The way I'm thinking about this field is that usually it's _mapcount
which is 0xffffffff to represent 0.  We allow a certain small amount
of underflow and still treat it as a mapcount.  We also allow for some
amount of overflow.  So to be utterly precise, what you had there would
have been fine, but for simplicity, I'd rather just do a signed compare
against -128.