Re: [PATCH 00/23] KAISER: unmap most of the kernel from userspace page tables

[Dave Hansen]

On 11/01/2017 11:27 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> So I'd like to see not just the comments about this, but I'd like to
> see the code itself actually making that very clear. Have *code* that
> verifies that nobody ever tries to use this on a user address (because
> that would *completely* screw up all coherency), but also I don't see
> why the code possibly looks up the old physical address in ther page
> table. Is there _any_ possible reason why you'd want to look up a page
> from an old page table? As far as I can tell, we should always know
> the physical page we are mapping a priori - we've never re-mapping
> random virtual addresses or a highmem page or anything like that.
> We're mapping the 1:1 kernel mapping only.

The vmalloc()'d stacks definitely need the page table walk.  That's yet
another thing that will get simpler once we stop needing to map the
process stacks.  I think there was also a need to do this for the fixmap
addresses for the GDT.

But, I'm totally with you on making this stuff less generic.