Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm: introduce put_user_page*(), placeholder versions

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 11:38:59AM -0800, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 10:11 PM John Hubbard <jhubbard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I don't have an answer for that, so maybe the page->mapping idea is dead already.
> >
> > So in that case, there is still one more way to do all of this, which is to
> > combine ZONE_DEVICE, HMM, and gup/dma information in a per-page struct, and get
> > there via basically page->private, more or less like this:
> 
> If we're going to allocate something new out-of-line then maybe we
> should go even further to allow for a page "proxy" object to front a
> real struct page. This idea arose from Dave Hansen as I explained to
> him the dax-reflink problem, and dovetails with Dave Chinner's
> suggestion earlier in this thread for dax-reflink.
> 
> Have get_user_pages() allocate a proxy object that gets passed around
> to drivers. Something like a struct page pointer with bit 0 set. This
> would add a conditional branch and pointer chase to many page
> operations, like page_to_pfn(), I thought something like it would be
> unacceptable a few years ago, but then HMM went and added similar
> overhead to put_page() and nobody balked.
> 
> This has the additional benefit of catching cases that might be doing
> a get_page() on a get_user_pages() result and should instead switch to
> a "ref_user_page()" (opposite of put_user_page()) as the API to take
> additional references on a get_user_pages() result.
> 
> page->index and page->mapping could be overridden by similar
> attributes in the proxy, and allow an N:1 relationship of proxy
> instances to actual pages. Filesystems could generate dynamic proxies
> as well.
> 
> The auxiliary information (dev_pagemap, hmm_data, etc...) moves to the
> proxy and stops polluting the base struct page which remains the
> canonical location for dirty-tracking and dma operations.
> 
> The difficulties are reconciling the source of the proxies as both
> get_user_pages() and filesystem may want to be the source of the
> allocation. In the get_user_pages_fast() path we may not be able to
> ask the filesystem for the proxy, at least not without destroying the
> performance expectations of get_user_pages_fast().

I think we can do better than a proxy object with bit 0 set.  I'd go
for allocating something like this:

struct dynamic_page {
	struct page;
	unsigned long vaddr;
	unsigned long pfn;
	...
};

and use a bit in struct page to indicate that this is a dynamic page.