Re: [PATCH 0/2] mm/mempolicy: stop copying state in the interleave paths

[Gregory Price]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2026 at 04:18:50PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:59:41 -0400 Gregory Price <gourry@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > The interleave node selectors and bulk allocators take copies of
> > nodemasks and node weights (for weighted interleave) in the fault path.
> > Both of these copies can be entirely eliminated.
> > 
> > For node weights, use SRCU to pin the weights in place.  This eliminates
> > a copy and a kmalloc from the bulk allocator path.
> > 
> > For nodemasks, we can operate directly on pol->nodes as long as we bounds
> > check the walk.  A concurrent rebind can shrink the mask, or tear the read
> > of it so the mask appears empty.
> > 
> >  - The interleave node selectors fall back to numa_node_id() when that
> >    happens, which is what they already did when a copy came back empty.
> > 
> >  - The bulk allocator simply returns what it managed to allocate.
> > 
> > The node count and weight totals are read separately from the nodemask
> > walk that consumes them - creating a time-of-check / time-of-use race.
> > Just clamp the walk to a single pass (number of nodes), and clamp each
> > bulk allocation chunk to the space left in the request.
> > 
> > The cost is distribution accuracy during a rebind.  The copies never
> > corrected for that either - they only kept the code from dividing by
> > zero and overrunning the allocation request.
> 
> Not very well, it seems.  Sashiko thinks there's a div-by-zero in
> alloc_pages_bulk_interleave().
> 
> 	https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260829015943.1258774-1-gourry@xxxxxxxxxx
> 

That's what this was for :]

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20260828193111.1023497-1-gourry@xxxxxxxxxx/

~Gregory