Re: Should page->count ever be -1?

From: Andrea Arcangeli (andrea@suse.de)
Date: Wed Jan 03 2001 - 16:55:05 EST


On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 03:07:03PM -0600, Timur Tabi wrote:
> I'm experiencing some kind of memory leaks playing with ioremap and iounmap,
> and I've narrowed down the problem to iounmap refusing to unmap the memory that
> I just mapped. The line of code in question is
>
> if (!PageReserved(page) && atomic_dec_and_test(&page->count)) {
>
> from page_alloc.c (this is 2.2.18pre15). It appears that page->count is
> already zero when this code is executed, and after it's executed, page->count
> becomes -1 (or more accurately, 0xFFFFFFFF). Is this acceptable, or is it an
> error condition?

It's an error condition. Make sure you marked the page as reserved in the mmap
callback if it's not an mmio region outside RAM.

Andrea
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