Re: [PATCH 14/15] mm, dax, pmem: introduce {get|put}_dev_pagemap() for dax-gup

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 3:42 PM, Logan Gunthorpe <logang@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On 02/10/15 03:53 PM, Dan Williams wrote:
>>
>> Yes, this location for dev_pagemap will not work.  I've since moved it
>> to a union with the lru list_head since ZONE_DEVICE pages memory
>> should always have an elevated page count and never land on a slab
>> allocator lru.
>
>
> Oh, also, I was actually hoping to make use of the lru list_head in the
> future with ZONE_DEVICE memory. One thought I had was once we have a PCIe
> device with a BAR space, we'd then need to have a way of allocating these
> buffers when user space needs them. The simple way I was thinking was to
> just use the lru list head to store lists of used and unused pages -- though
> there are probably other solutions to this that don't require using struct
> pages.
>

The current assumption is the ZONE_DEVICE ranges are being managed by
a physical address allocator.  In the case of persistent memory this
is the block allocator of the filesystem sitting on top of a pmem
block device.  The struct page is really only there to facilitate
in-flight I/O requests.  If it weren't for complexity we'd allocate
them on demand.  So you're "unused" case should be a raw pfn and then
for the time-limited duration it is in use as a struct page it should
hold a reference against the mapping.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/