Since there is no longer an atomic allocation of vmemmap pages, but a fixed flag(GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_THISNODE) is used. The description of atomicity here is some what inappropriate. And the atomic parameter naming of update_and_free_page() may be misleading, add a comment here. Signed-off-by: luofei <luofei@xxxxxxxxxxxx> --- mm/hugetlb.c | 17 ++++++++++++----- 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/mm/hugetlb.c b/mm/hugetlb.c index f8ca7cca3c1a..fbf598bbc4e3 100644 --- a/mm/hugetlb.c +++ b/mm/hugetlb.c @@ -1569,10 +1569,12 @@ static void __update_and_free_page(struct hstate *h, struct page *page) } /* - * As update_and_free_page() can be called under any context, so we cannot - * use GFP_KERNEL to allocate vmemmap pages. However, we can defer the - * actual freeing in a workqueue to prevent from using GFP_ATOMIC to allocate - * the vmemmap pages. + * Freeing hugetlb pages in done in update_and_free_page(). When freeing + * a hugetlb page, vmemmap pages may need to be allocated. The routine + * alloc_huge_page_vmemmap() can possibly sleep as it uses GFP_KERNEL. + * However, update_and_free_page() can be called under any context. To + * avoid the possibility of sleeping in a context where sleeping is not + * allowed, defer the actual freeing in a workqueue where sleeping is allowed. * * free_hpage_workfn() locklessly retrieves the linked list of pages to be * freed and frees them one-by-one. As the page->mapping pointer is going @@ -1616,6 +1618,10 @@ static inline void flush_free_hpage_work(struct hstate *h) flush_work(&free_hpage_work); } +/* + * atomic == true indicates called from a context where sleeping is + * not allowed. + */ static void update_and_free_page(struct hstate *h, struct page *page, bool atomic) { @@ -1625,7 +1631,8 @@ static void update_and_free_page(struct hstate *h, struct page *page, } /* - * Defer freeing to avoid using GFP_ATOMIC to allocate vmemmap pages. + * Defer freeing to avoid possible sleeping when allocating + * vmemmap pages. * * Only call schedule_work() if hpage_freelist is previously * empty. Otherwise, schedule_work() had been called but the workfn -- 2.27.0