Disabling the interrupt will prevent the tlb flush IPI from coming in and flushing this cpu's tlb, but I don't see how it will prevent some other cpu from actually updating the pte in the pagetable, which is what we're concerned about here.
The thread that cleared the pte holds the pte lock and is now waiting for the IPI. The thread that wants to update the pte will wait for the pte lock, thus also waits on the IPI and gup_fast()'s local_irq_enable(). I think.
But hasn't it already done the pte update at that point?
(I think this conversation really is moot because the kernel never does P->P pte updates any more; its always P->N->P.)
Is this the only reason to disable interrupts?
Another comment says it also prevents pagetable teardown.
We could take a reference to the mm to get the same effect, no?