On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 8:38 AM, Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote: > when checking users of get_user_pages() (I'm doing some cleanups in that > area to fix filesystem's issues with mmap_sem locking) I've noticed that > infiniband drivers add number of pages obtained from get_user_pages() to > mm->pinned_vm counter. Although this makes some sence, it doesn't match > with any other user of get_user_pages() (e.g. direct IO) so has infiniband > some special reason why it does so? Direct IO mappings are in some sense ephemeral -- they only need to last while the IO is in flight. In contrast the IB memory pinning is controlled by (possibly unprivileged) userspace and might last the whole lifetime of a long-lived application. So we want some accounting and resource control. > Also that seems to be the only real reason why mmap_sem has to be grabbed > in exclusive mode, am I right? Most likely that is true. > Another suspicious thing (at least in drivers/infiniband/core/umem.c: > ib_umem_get()) is that arguments of get_user_pages() are like: > ret = get_user_pages(current, current->mm, cur_base, > min_t(unsigned long, npages, > PAGE_SIZE / sizeof (struct page *)), > 1, !umem->writable, page_list, vma_list); > So we always have write argument set to 1 and force argument is set to > !umem->writable. Is that really intentional? My naive guess would be that > arguments should be switched... Although even in that case I fail to see > why 'force' argument should be set. Can someone please explain? This confused even me recently. We had a long discussion (read the whole thread starting here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/26/7) but in short the current parameters seem to be needed to trigger COW even when the kernel/hardware want to read the memory, to avoid problems where we get stale data if userspace triggers COW. I think I better add a comment explaining this. > Finally (and here I may show my ignorance ;), I'd like to ask whether > there's any reason why ib_umem_get() checks for is_vm_hugetlb_page() and > not just whether a page is a huge page? I'm not sure of the history here. How would one check directly if a page is a huge page? get_user_pages() actually goes to some trouble to return all small pages, even when it has to split a single huge page into many entries in the page array. (Which is actually a bit unfortunate for our use here) - R. -- 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>