[PATCH 03/21] mm: Improve page_lock_anon_vma() comment

[Peter Zijlstra]

A slightly more verbose comment to go along with the trickery in
page_lock_anon_vma().

Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx>
LKML-Reference: <1271158226.4807.1107.camel@twins>
---
 mm/rmap.c |   18 ++++++++++++++++--
 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

Index: linux-2.6/mm/rmap.c
===================================================================
--- linux-2.6.orig/mm/rmap.c
+++ linux-2.6/mm/rmap.c
@@ -311,8 +311,22 @@ void __init anon_vma_init(void)
 }
 
 /*
- * Getting a lock on a stable anon_vma from a page off the LRU is
- * tricky: page_lock_anon_vma rely on RCU to guard against the races.
+ * Getting a lock on a stable anon_vma from a page off the LRU is tricky!
+ *
+ * Since there is no serialization what so ever against page_remove_rmap()
+ * the best this function can do is return a locked anon_vma that might
+ * have been relevant to this page.
+ *
+ * The page might have been remapped to a different anon_vma or the anon_vma
+ * returned may already be freed (and even reused).
+ *
+ * All users of this function must be very careful when walking the anon_vma
+ * chain and verify that the page in question is indeed mapped in it
+ * [ something equivalent to page_mapped_in_vma() ].
+ *
+ * Since anon_vma's slab is DESTROY_BY_RCU and we know from page_remove_rmap()
+ * that the anon_vma pointer from page->mapping is valid if there is a
+ * mapcount, we can dereference the anon_vma after observing those.
  */
 struct anon_vma *page_lock_anon_vma(struct page *page)
 {


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