On Fri, Sep 16, 2022 at 02:46:38PM -0700, Mike Kravetz wrote: > When creating hugetlb pages, the hugetlb code must first allocate > contiguous pages from a low level allocator such as buddy, cma or > memblock. The pages returned from these low level allocators are > ref counted. This creates potential issues with other code taking > speculative references on these pages before they can be transformed to > a hugetlb page. This issue has been addressed with methods and code > such as that provided in [1]. > > Recent discussions about vmemmap freeing [2] have indicated that it > would be beneficial to freeze all sub pages, including the head page > of pages returned from low level allocators before converting to a > hugetlb page. This helps avoid races if we want to replace the page > containing vmemmap for the head page. > > There have been proposals to change at least the buddy allocator to > return frozen pages as described at [3]. If such a change is made, it > can be employed by the hugetlb code. However, as mentioned above > hugetlb uses several low level allocators so each would need to be > modified to return frozen pages. For now, we can manually freeze the > returned pages. This is done in two places: > 1) alloc_buddy_huge_page, only the returned head page is ref counted. > We freeze the head page, retrying once in the VERY rare case where > there may be an inflated ref count. > 2) prep_compound_gigantic_page, for gigantic pages the current code > freezes all pages except the head page. New code will simply freeze > the head page as well. > > In a few other places, code checks for inflated ref counts on newly > allocated hugetlb pages. With the modifications to freeze after > allocating, this code can be removed. > > After hugetlb pages are freshly allocated, they are often added to the > hugetlb free lists. Since these pages were previously ref counted, this > was done via put_page() which would end up calling the hugetlb > destructor: free_huge_page. With changes to freeze pages, we simply > call free_huge_page directly to add the pages to the free list. > > In a few other places, freshly allocated hugetlb pages were immediately > put into use, and the expectation was they were already ref counted. In > these cases, we must manually ref count the page. > > [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210622021423.154662-3-mike.kravetz@xxxxxxxxxx/ > [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20220802180309.19340-1-joao.m.martins@xxxxxxxxxx/ > [3] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20220809171854.3725722-1-willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/ > > Signed-off-by: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@xxxxxxxxxx> Hi Mike, this looks great and simplifies the code much more. I got a question though: > --- a/mm/hugetlb.c > +++ b/mm/hugetlb.c > @@ -1787,9 +1787,8 @@ static bool __prep_compound_gigantic_page(struct page *page, unsigned int order, > > /* we rely on prep_new_huge_page to set the destructor */ > set_compound_order(page, order); > - __ClearPageReserved(page); > __SetPageHead(page); > - for (i = 1; i < nr_pages; i++) { > + for (i = 0; i < nr_pages; i++) { > p = nth_page(page, i); > > /* > @@ -1830,17 +1829,19 @@ static bool __prep_compound_gigantic_page(struct page *page, unsigned int order, > } else { > VM_BUG_ON_PAGE(page_count(p), p); > } > - set_compound_head(p, page); > + if (i != 0) > + set_compound_head(p, page); Sure I am missing something here, but why we only freeze refcount here in case it is for demote? We seem to be doing it inconditionally in alloc_buddy_huge_page. -- Oscar Salvador SUSE Labs
