Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm/rmap: Improve mlock tracking for large folios

From: Johannes Weiner

Date: Thu Sep 18 2025 - 10:38:37 EST


On Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 12:21:57PM +0100, kirill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> From: Kiryl Shutsemau <kas@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> The kernel currently does not mlock large folios when adding them to
> rmap, stating that it is difficult to confirm that the folio is fully
> mapped and safe to mlock it. However, nowadays the caller passes a
> number of pages of the folio that are getting mapped, making it easy to
> check if the entire folio is mapped to the VMA.
>
> mlock the folio on rmap if it is fully mapped to the VMA.
>
> Signed-off-by: Kiryl Shutsemau <kas@xxxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

> ---
> mm/rmap.c | 13 ++++---------
> 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/mm/rmap.c b/mm/rmap.c
> index 568198e9efc2..ca8d4ef42c2d 100644
> --- a/mm/rmap.c
> +++ b/mm/rmap.c
> @@ -1478,13 +1478,8 @@ static __always_inline void __folio_add_anon_rmap(struct folio *folio,
> PageAnonExclusive(cur_page), folio);
> }
>
> - /*
> - * For large folio, only mlock it if it's fully mapped to VMA. It's
> - * not easy to check whether the large folio is fully mapped to VMA
> - * here. Only mlock normal 4K folio and leave page reclaim to handle
> - * large folio.
> - */
> - if (!folio_test_large(folio))
> + /* Only mlock it if the folio is fully mapped to the VMA */
> + if (folio_nr_pages(folio) == nr_pages)
> mlock_vma_folio(folio, vma);

Minor nit, but it might be useful to still mention in the comment that
partially mapped folios are punted to reclaim.