Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm: set PG_dma_pinned on get_user_pages*()

From: Dan Williams
Date: Tue Jun 19 2018 - 21:24:30 EST


On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 11:11 AM, John Hubbard <jhubbard@xxxxxxxxxx> 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:
[..]
>> And then there's the aspect that both these approaches are a bit too
>> heavyweight for some get_user_pages_fast() users (e.g. direct IO) - Al Viro
>> had an idea to use page lock for that path but e.g. fs/direct-io.c would have
>> problems due to lock ordering constraints (filesystem ->get_block would
>> suddently get called with the page lock held). But we can probably leave
>> performance optimizations for phase two.
>
>
> So I assume that phase one would be to apply this approach only to
> get_user_pages_longterm. (Please let me know if that's wrong.)

I think that's wrong, because get_user_pages_longterm() is only a
filesystem-dax avoidance mechanism, it's not trying to address all the
problems that Jan is talking about. I don't see any viable half-step
solutions.