Re: [PATCH v11 2/8] iov_iter: Add a function to extract a page list from an iterator

From: Al Viro
Date: Thu Jan 26 2023 - 20:21:44 EST


On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 12:52:38AM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 11:56:50PM +0000, David Howells wrote:
> > Al says that pinning a page (ie. FOLL_PIN) could cause a deadlock if a page is
> > vmspliced into a pipe with the pipe holding a pin on it because pinned pages
> > are removed from all page tables. Is this actually the case? I can't see
> > offhand where in mm/gup.c it does this.
>
> It doesn't; sorry, really confused memories of what's going on, took a while
> to sort them out (FWIW, writeback is where we unmap and check if page is
> pinned, while pin_user_pages running into an unmapped page will end up
> with handle_mm_fault() (->fault(), actually) try to get the sucker locked
> and block on that until the writeback is over).

Umm... OK, I really need to reread that area. Hopefully will be done with
that by tomorrow...