Re: [PATCH v2 05/12] mm/collapse: state what a collapse may do in the policy

From: Baolin Wang

Date: Mon Sep 14 2026 - 04:40:01 EST




On 9/10/26 8:02 PM, Kiryl Shutsemau wrote:
From: "Kiryl Shutsemau (Meta)" <kas@xxxxxxxxxx>

Tests scattered through the collapse path decide what a collapse is
allowed to do by asking whether khugepaged started it. Between them they
settle:

- which VMAs are eligible, and how hard to try for a folio;
- how many empty, swapped-out or shared PTEs a window may contain, and
whether a sub-PMD window is held to a stricter rule than a PMD;
- whether a range has to look used, and whether a MADV_FREE'd page is
left alone;
- whether the PMD is mapped as part of the request, and whether dirty
pages are worth writing back and retrying.

None of those is a fact about khugepaged. Each is something the caller
decided before asking, and the collapse code should not have to look up
who called to find out.

Add struct collapse_policy for the caller to fill: khugepaged from its
own settings, MADV_COLLAPSE from the fact that a user asked explicitly.
Every test becomes a read of a field, and cc->is_khugepaged goes, having
no reader left.

khugepaged fills the policy once per scan pass, MADV_COLLAPSE once per
call. That is the one change in behaviour. The max_ptes_* limits and the
defrag setting behind the allocation mask are sampled once per pass rather
than on every table. A table scanned early in a pass and one scanned late
are then judged alike.

collapse_file() also drops a NULL check on the collapse_control. It has
one call site, reached only from collapse_single_pmd(), which dereferences
cc unconditionally, so the check was already dead.

Assisted-by: LLM
Signed-off-by: Kiryl Shutsemau (Meta) <kas@xxxxxxxxxx>
---

Thanks. The logic is much clearer now.
Reviewed-by: Baolin Wang <baolin.wang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>