On 03/08/17 17:47, Jerome Glisse wrote: > On Thu, Aug 03, 2017 at 03:55:50PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote: >> On Thu 03-08-17 15:20:31, Igor Stoppa wrote: [...] >>> I am confused about this: if "private2" is a pointer, but when I get an >>> address, I do not even know if the address represents a valid pmalloc >>> page, how can i know when it's ok to dereference "private2"? >> >> because you can make all pages which back vmalloc mappings have vm_area >> pointer set. > > Note that i think this might break some device driver that use vmap() > i think some of them use private field to store device driver specific > informations. But there likely is an unuse field in struct page that > can be use for that. This increases the unease from my side ... it looks like there is no way to fully understand if a field is really used or not, without having deep intimate knowledge of lots of code that is only marginally involved :-/ Similarly, how would I be able to specify what would be the correct way to decide the member of the union to use for handling the field? If there were either some sort of non-multiplexed tag/cookie field or a function, that would specify how to treat the various unions, then it would be easier to multiplex the remaining data, according to how the page is used. -- igor -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>
