[PATCH 0/3] introduce get_user_pages_longterm()

From: Dan Williams
Date: Mon Nov 06 2017 - 20:05:33 EST


Andrew,

Here is a new get_user_pages api for cases where a driver intends to
keep an elevated page count indefinitely. This is distinct from usages
like iov_iter_get_pages where the elevated page counts are transient.
The iov_iter_get_pages cases immediately turn around and submit the
pages to a device driver which will put_page when the i/o operation
completes (under kernel control).

In the longterm case userspace is responsible for dropping the page
reference at some undefined point in the future. This is untenable for
filesystem-dax case where the filesystem is in control of the lifetime
of the block / page and needs reasonable limits on how long it can wait
for pages in a mapping to become idle.

Fixing filesystems to actually wait for dax pages to be idle before
blocks from a truncate/hole-punch operation are repurposed is saved for
a later patch series.

Also, allowing longterm registration of dax mappings is a future patch
series that introduces a "map with lease" semantic where the kernel can
revoke a lease and force userspace to drop its page references.

I have also tagged these for -stable to purposely break cases that might
assume that longterm memory registrations for filesystem-dax mappings
were supported by the kernel. The behavior regression this policy change
implies is one of the reasons we maintain the "dax enabled. Warning:
EXPERIMENTAL, use at your own risk" notification when mounting a
filesystem in dax mode.

It is worth noting the device-dax interface does not suffer the same
constraints since it does not support file space management operations
like hole-punch.

---

Dan Williams (3):
mm: introduce get_user_pages_longterm
IB/core: disable memory registration of fileystem-dax vmas
[media] v4l2: disable filesystem-dax mapping support


drivers/infiniband/core/umem.c | 2 -
drivers/media/v4l2-core/videobuf-dma-sg.c | 5 +-
include/linux/mm.h | 3 +
mm/gup.c | 75 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4 files changed, 82 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)