On Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 09:41:18AM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote: > I'm not a friend of these "overlays"; it all only really makes sense to me > once we actually allocate the descriptors dynamically. Maybe some of the > existing/ongoing conversions were different (that's why I was asking for the > difference, as you said the "struct slab" thing was well received). > > If they are primarily only unnecessary churn for now (and unclear when/how > it will become useful), I share your opinion. One of the reasons for doing these conversions "early" is that it helps people who work on this code know what fields they can actually use in their memory descriptor. We have a _lot_ of historical baggage with people just using random bits in struct page for their own purposes without necessarily considering the effects on the rest of the system. By creating specific types for each user of struct page, we can see what's actually going on. Before the ptdesc conversion started, I could not have told you which bits in struct page were used by the s390 code. I knew they were playing some fun games with the refcount (it's even documented in the s390 code!) but I didn't know they were using ... whetever it is; page->private to point to the kvm private data? So maybe it is harder for MM developers right now to see what fields in memdesc A overlap with which fields in memdesc B. That _ought_ not to be a concern! We document which fields are available in each memdesc, and have various assertions to trip when people make things not line up any more. There can still be problems, of course; we haven't set the assertions quite tightly enough in some cases. People are going to keep adding crap to struct page, and they're going to keep misusing the crap that's in struct page. That has to stop.
