Re: [PATCH v2 03/13] mm: Add generic p?d_large() macros

[Mike Rapoport]

Him Kirill,

On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 12:06:18AM +0300, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 05:16:46PM +0000, Steven Price wrote:
> > >> Note that in terms of the new page walking code, these new defines are
> > >> only used when walking a page table without a VMA (which isn't currently
> > >> done), so architectures which don't use p?d_large currently will work
> > >> fine with the generic versions. They only need to provide meaningful
> > >> definitions when switching to use the walk-without-a-VMA functionality.
> > > 
> > > How other architectures would know that they need to provide the helpers
> > > to get walk-without-a-VMA functionality? This looks very fragile to me.
> > 
> > Yes, you've got a good point there. This would apply to the p?d_large
> > macros as well - any arch which (inadvertently) uses the generic version
> > is likely to be fragile/broken.
> > 
> > I think probably the best option here is to scrap the generic versions
> > altogether and simply introduce a ARCH_HAS_PXD_LARGE config option which
> > would enable the new functionality to those arches that opt-in. Do you
> > think this would be less fragile?
> 
> These helpers are useful beyond pagewalker.
> 
> Can we actually do some grinding and make *all* archs to provide correct
> helpers? Yes, it's tedious, but not that bad.

Many architectures simply cannot support non-leaf entries at the higher
levels. I think letting the use a generic helper actually does make sense.
 
> I think we could provide generic helpers for folded levels in
> <asm-generic/pgtable-nop?d.h> and rest has to be provided by the arch.
> Architectures that support only 2 level paging would need to provide
> pgd_large(), with 3 -- pmd_large() and so on.
> 
> -- 
>  Kirill A. Shutemov

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Mike.