On Fri 19-02-21 11:40:30, Oscar Salvador wrote: > On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 10:56:42AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote: > > OK, this should work but I am really wondering whether it wouldn't be > > just simpler to replace the old page by a new one in the free list > > directly. Or is there any reason we have to go through the generic > > helpers path? I mean something like this > > > > new_page = alloc_fresh_huge_page(); > > if (!new_page) > > goto fail; > > spin_lock(hugetlb_lock); > > if (!PageHuge(old_page)) { > > /* freed from under us, nothing to do */ > > __update_and_free_page(new_page); > > goto unlock; > > } > > list_del(&old_page->lru); > > __update_and_free_page(old_page); > > __enqueue_huge_page(new_page); > > unlock: > > spin_unlock(hugetlb_lock); > > > > This will require to split update_and_free_page and enqueue_huge_page to > > counters independent parts but that shouldn't be a big deal. But it will > > also protect from any races. Not an act of beauty but seems less hackish > > to me. > > On a closer look, do we really need to decouple update_and_free_page and > enqueue_huge_page? These two functions do not handle the lock, but rather > the functions that call them (as would be in our case). > Only update_and_free_page drops the lock during the freeing of a gigantic page > and then it takes it again, as the caller is who took the lock. > > am I missing anything obvious here? It is not the lock that I care about but more about counters. The intention was that there is a single place to handle both enqueing and dequeing. As not all places require counters to be updated. E.g. the migration which just replaces one page by another. -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs