Re: [PATCH v4 05/10] mm/gup: migrate pinned pages out of movable zone

[Pavel Tatashin]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 4:43 AM Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu 17-12-20 13:52:38, Pavel Tatashin wrote:
> > +      * 1. Pinned pages: (long-term) pinning of movable pages is avoided
> > +      *    when pages are pinned and faulted, but it is still possible that
> > +      *    address space already has pages in ZONE_MOVABLE at the time when
> > +      *    pages are pinned (i.e. user has touches that memory before
> > +      *    pinning). In such case we try to migrate them to a different zone,
> > +      *    but if migration fails the pages can still end-up pinned in
> > +      *    ZONE_MOVABLE. In such case, memory offlining might retry a long
> > +      *    time and will only succeed once user application unpins pages.
>
> I still dislike this. Pinning can fail so there shouldn't be any reasons
> to break MOVABLE constrain for something that can be handled. If
> anything there should be a very good reasoning behind this decision
> documented.

This is basically current behaviour, after patch 8, we can never pin
pages in the movable zone, so I will update this comment in that
patch.

Thank you,
Pasha

> --
> Michal Hocko
> SUSE Labs