Re: [PATCH 01/16] mm: correctly handle UFFD PTE markers

From: Vlastimil Babka

Date: Wed Nov 05 2025 - 13:25:13 EST


On 11/3/25 13:31, Lorenzo Stoakes wrote:
> PTE markers were previously only concerned with UFFD-specific logic - that
> is, PTE entries with the UFFD WP marker set or those marked via
> UFFDIO_POISON.
>
> However since the introduction of guard markers in commit
> 7c53dfbdb024 ("mm: add PTE_MARKER_GUARD PTE marker"), this has no longer
> been the case.
>
> Issues have been avoided as guard regions are not permitted in conjunction
> with UFFD, but it still leaves very confusing logic in place, most notably
> the misleading and poorly named pte_none_mostly() and
> huge_pte_none_mostly().
>
> This predicate returns true for PTE entries that ought to be treated as
> none, but only in certain circumstances, and on the assumption we are
> dealing with H/W poison markers or UFFD WP markers.
>
> This patch removes these functions and makes each invocation of these
> functions instead explicitly check what it needs to check.
>
> As part of this effort it introduces is_uffd_pte_marker() to explicitly
> determine if a marker in fact is used as part of UFFD or not.
>
> In the HMM logic we note that the only time we would need to check for a
> fault is in the case of a UFFD WP marker, otherwise we simply encounter a
> fault error (VM_FAULT_HWPOISON for H/W poisoned marker, VM_FAULT_SIGSEGV
> for a guard marker), so only check for the UFFD WP case.
>
> While we're here we also refactor code to make it easier to understand.
>
> Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@xxxxxxxxxx>

Nice cleanup!

Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>