Re: [PATCH v1 00/11] Zero page->private when freeing pages

[Christian König]

On 2/23/26 14:46, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 22, 2026 at 10:26:30PM -0500, Zi Yan wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Based on a recent discussion with David Hildenbrand on page->private
>> is not zero when a page is freed[1], this patchset is trying to fix all
>> users do not zero ->private when freeing a page and add checks to make
>> sure all freed pages have ->private set to zero. For compound pages,
>> both head page and tail pages need to have ->private set to zero.
> 
> Requiring the user to clear a field before freeing is just a way to
> awkward interface.  Don't do that.

Completely agree. This is just asking for trouble.

The cache line(s) backing this struct page are most likely accessed anyway on free/alloc. So I don't see much extra overhead.

Regards,
Christian.