Re: [External] Re: [RFC PATCH 00/24] mm/hugetlb: Free some vmemmap pages of hugetlb page

[Muchun Song]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 11:42 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 11:28:01PM +0800, Muchun Song wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 10:32 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 08:59:23PM +0800, Muchun Song wrote:
> > > > This patch series will free some vmemmap pages(struct page structures)
> > > > associated with each hugetlbpage when preallocated to save memory.
> > >
> > > It would be lovely to be able to do this.  Unfortunately, it's completely
> > > impossible right now.  Consider, for example, get_user_pages() called
> > > on the fifth page of a hugetlb page.
> >
> > Can you elaborate on the problem? Thanks so much.
>
> OK, let's say you want to do a 2kB I/O to offset 0x5000 of a 2MB page
> on a 4kB base page system.  Today, that results in a bio_vec containing
> {head+5, 0, 0x800}.  Then we call page_to_phys() on that (head+5) struct
> page to get the physical address of the I/O, and we turn it into a struct
> scatterlist, which similarly has a reference to the page (head+5).

As I know, in this case, the get_user_pages() will get a reference
to the head page (head+0) before returning such that the hugetlb
page can not be freed. Although get_user_pages() returns the
page (head+5) and the scatterlist has a reference to the page
(head+5), this patch series can handle this situation. I can not
figure out where the problem is. What I missed? Thanks.

>
> If you're returning page (head+1) from get_user_pages(), all the
> calculations will be wrong and you'll do DMA to the wrong address.
>
> What needs to happen is a conversion to get_user_bvecs().  That way we
> can return a bvec which is {head, 0x5000, 0x800} and the calculations
> will work.  So that's going to involve touching a lot of device drivers.
> Christoph has a start on it here:
> http://git.infradead.org/users/hch/misc.git/shortlog/refs/heads/gup-bvec
>
> Overlapping with that is a desire to change the biovec so that it
> only stores {phys_addr, length} rather than {page, offset, length}.
> We're also going to have to rework the scatterlist so that it doesn't
> carry a struct page either.



-- 
Yours,
Muchun