Re: [RFC][alpha] saner vmalloc handling (was Re: [Bug report] hash_name() may cross page boundary and trigger sleep in RCU context)

[Al Viro]

On Sun, Nov 30, 2025 at 02:16:13PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Nov 2025 at 19:01, Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > +         Default is 8Gb total and under normal circumstances, this is so
> > +         far and above what is needed as to be laughable.  However, there are
> > +         certain applications (such as benchmark-grade in-kernel web serving)
> > +         that can make use of as much vmalloc space as is available.
> 
> I wonder if we even need the config variable?
> 
> Because this reads like the whole feature exists due to the old 'tux'
> web server thing (from the early 2000's - long long gone, never merged
> upstream).
> 
> So I'm not sure there are any actual real use-cases for tons of
> vmalloc space on alpha.
> 
> Anyway, I see no real objections to the patch, only a "maybe it could
> be cut down even more".

FWIW, I'm trying to figure out what's going on with amd64 in that area;
we used to do allocate-on-demand until 2020, when Joerg went for "let's
preallocate them" and killed arch_sync_kernel_mappings(), which got
reverted soon after, only to be brought back when Joerg had fixed the
bug in preallocation.  It stayed that way until this August, when
commit 6659d027998083fbb6d42a165b0c90dc2e8ba989
Author: Harry Yoo <harry.yoo@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date:   Mon Aug 18 11:02:06 2025 +0900
 
     x86/mm/64: define ARCH_PAGE_TABLE_SYNC_MASK and arch_sync_kernel_mappings()

happened, with reference to this
commit 8d400913c231bd1da74067255816453f96cd35b0
Author: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@xxxxxxx>
Date:   Thu Apr 29 22:57:19 2021 -0700
 
     x86/vmemmap: handle unpopulated sub-pmd ranges

What I don't understand is how does that manage to avoid the same race -
on #PF amd64 does not bother with vmalloc_fault logics.  Exact same
scenario with two vmalloc() on different CPUs would seem to apply here
as well...

Which callers of arch_sync_kernel_mappings() are involved?  If it's
anything in mm/vmalloc.c, I really don't see how that could be correct;
if it's about apply_to_page_range() and calls never hit vmalloc space,
we might be OK, but it would be nice to have described somewhere...

Am I missing something obvious here?