Re: [RFC PATCH] mm/hugetlb: make hugetlb_lock irq safe

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Wed Sep 05 2018 - 18:00:13 EST


On Wed, 5 Sep 2018 14:35:11 -0700 Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > so perhaps we could put some
> > stopgap workaround into that site and add a runtime warning into the
> > put_page() code somewhere to detect puttage of huge pages from hardirq
> > and softirq contexts.
>
> I think we would add the warning/etc at free_huge_page. The issue would
> only apply to hugetlb pages, not THP.
>
> But, the more I think about it the more I think Aneesh's patch to do
> spin_lock/unlock_irqsave is the right way to go. Currently, we only
> know of one place where a put_page of hugetlb pages is done from softirq
> context. So, we could take the spin_lock/unlock_bh as Matthew suggested.
> When the powerpc iommu code was added, I doubt this was taken into account.
> I would be afraid of someone adding put_page from hardirq context.

Me too. If we're going to do this, surely we should make hugepages
behave in the same fashion as PAGE_SIZE pages.