Re: [PATCH 1/7] mm: Document x86 uses a linked list of pgds

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 02:41:09PM -0700, Ira Weiny wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 12:44:43PM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > x86 uses page->lru of the pages used for pgds, but that's not immediately
> > obvious to anyone looking to make changes.  Add a struct list_head to
> > the union so it's clearly in use for pgds.
> 
> Shouldn't pgd_list_{add,del}() use this list head variable instead of lru to
> complete the documentation?
> 
> Probably the list iteration loops arch/x86/* as well?

Yes, but I felt that was out of scope for this patchset.  Untangling the
uses of struct page is a long and messy business; if we have to fix
everything at once, we'll never get anywhere.  There's also the slab
users of page->lru instead of page->slab_list.

What I actually want to get to is:

struct page {
	unsigned long flags;
	union {
		struct file_page file;
		struct anon_page anon;
		struct pt_page pt;
		struct slab_page slab;
		struct tail_page tail;
		struct rcu_head rcu;
	};
	union {
		atomic_t _mapcount;
		...
	};
	atomic_t refcount;
	...
};

and then we can refer to page->pt.list and so on.