On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 11:28:01PM +0800, Muchun Song wrote: > On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 10:32 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 08:59:23PM +0800, Muchun Song wrote: > > > This patch series will free some vmemmap pages(struct page structures) > > > associated with each hugetlbpage when preallocated to save memory. > > > > It would be lovely to be able to do this. Unfortunately, it's completely > > impossible right now. Consider, for example, get_user_pages() called > > on the fifth page of a hugetlb page. > > Can you elaborate on the problem? Thanks so much. OK, let's say you want to do a 2kB I/O to offset 0x5000 of a 2MB page on a 4kB base page system. Today, that results in a bio_vec containing {head+5, 0, 0x800}. Then we call page_to_phys() on that (head+5) struct page to get the physical address of the I/O, and we turn it into a struct scatterlist, which similarly has a reference to the page (head+5). If you're returning page (head+1) from get_user_pages(), all the calculations will be wrong and you'll do DMA to the wrong address. What needs to happen is a conversion to get_user_bvecs(). That way we can return a bvec which is {head, 0x5000, 0x800} and the calculations will work. So that's going to involve touching a lot of device drivers. Christoph has a start on it here: http://git.infradead.org/users/hch/misc.git/shortlog/refs/heads/gup-bvec Overlapping with that is a desire to change the biovec so that it only stores {phys_addr, length} rather than {page, offset, length}. We're also going to have to rework the scatterlist so that it doesn't carry a struct page either.