linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm: set PG_dma_pinned on get_user

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Date:   Mon, 25 Jun 2018 12:03:37 -0700
From:   John Hubbard <jhubbard@...dia.com>
To:     Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
CC:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>, Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@...pe.ca>,
        John Hubbard <john.hubbard@...il.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>,
        Christopher Lameter <cl@...ux.com>,
        Linux MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-rdma <linux-rdma@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm: set PG_dma_pinned on get_user_pages*()

On 06/25/2018 08:21 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Thu 21-06-18 18:30:36, Jan Kara wrote:
>> On Wed 20-06-18 15:55:41, John Hubbard wrote:
>>> On 06/20/2018 05:08 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
>>>> On Tue 19-06-18 11:11:48, John Hubbard wrote:
>>>>> On 06/19/2018 03:41 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue 19-06-18 02:02:55, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>>>>>>> On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 10:29:49AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
>>> [...]
> I've spent some time on this. There are two obstacles with my approach of
> putting special entry into inode's VMA tree:
> 
> 1) If I want to place this special entry in inode's VMA tree, I either need
> to allocate full VMA, somehow initiate it so that it's clear it's a special
> "pinned" range, not a VMA => uses unnecessarily too much memory, it is
> ugly. Another solution I was hoping for was that I would factor out some
> common bits of vm_area_struct (pgoff, rb_node, ..) into a structure common
> for VMA and the locked range => doable but causes a lot of churn as VMAs
> are accessed (and modified!) at hundreds of places in the kernel. Some
> accessor functions would help to reduce the churn a bit but then stuff like
> vma_set_pgoff(vma, pgoff) isn't exactly beautiful either.
> 
> 2) Some users of GUP (e.g. direct IO) get a block of pages and then put
> references to these pages at different times and in random order -
> basically when IO for given page is completed, reference is dropped and one
> GUP call can acquire page references for pages which end up in multiple
> different bios (we don't know in advance). This makes is difficult to
> implement counterpart to GUP to 'unpin' a range of pages - we'd either have
> to support partial unpins (and splitting of pinned ranges and all such fun)
> or just have to track internally in how many pages are still pinned in the
> originally pinned range and release the pin once all individual pages are
> unpinned but then it's difficult to e.g. get to this internal structure
> from IO completion callback where we only have the bio.
>
> So I think the Matthew's idea of removing pinned pages from LRU is
> definitely worth trying to see how complex that would end up being. Did you
> get to looking into it? If not, I can probably find some time to try that
> out.
> 

OK. Even if we remove the pages from the LRU, we still have to insert a "put_gup_page"
or similarly named call. But it could be a simple replacement for put_page, with
that approach, so that does make it much much easier.
 
I was (and still am) planning on tackling this today, so let me see how far I
get before yelling for help. :)

thanks,
-- 
John Hubbard
NVIDIA