On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 09:11:53PM -0500, Qian Cai wrote: > On Jan 27, 2020, at 8:28 PM, Anshuman Khandual <Anshuman.Khandual@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > This adds tests which will validate architecture page table helpers and > > other accessors in their compliance with expected generic MM semantics. > > This will help various architectures in validating changes to existing > > page table helpers or addition of new ones. [...] > What’s the value of this block of new code? It only supports x86 and > arm64 which are supposed to be good now. Did those tests ever find any > regression or this is almost only useful for new architectures which > only happened once in a few years? The primary goal here is not finding regressions but having clearly defined semantics of the page table accessors across architectures. x86 and arm64 are a good starting point and other architectures will be enabled as they are aligned to the same semantics. See for example this past discussion: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20190628102003.GA56463@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ These tests should act as the 'contract' between the generic mm code and the architecture port. Without clear semantics, some bugs may be a lot subtler than a boot failure. FTR, I fully support this patch (and I should get around to review it properly; thanks for the reminder ;)). -- Catalin
