Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] Discuss least bad options for resolving longterm-GUP usage by RDMA

[John Hubbard]

On 2/11/19 2:12 PM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 01:22:11PM -0800, John Hubbard wrote:
> 
>> The only way that breaks is if longterm pins imply an irreversible action, such
>> as blocking and waiting in a way that you can't back out of or get interrupted
>> out of. And the design doesn't seem to be going in that direction, right?
> 
> RDMA, vfio, etc will always have 'long term' pins that are
> irreversible on demand. It is part of the HW capability.
> 

Yes, I get that about the HW. But I didn't quite phrase it accurately. What I
meant was, irreversible from the kernel code's point of view; specifically,
the filesystem while in various writeback paths.

But anyway, Jan's proposal a bit earlier today [1] is finally sinking into
my head--if we actually go that way, and prevent the caller from setting up
a problematic gup pin in the first place, then that may make this point sort
of moot.


> I think the flag is badly named, it is really more of a
> GUP_LOCK_PHYSICAL_ADDRESSES flag.
> 
> ie indicate to the FS that is should not attempt to remap physical
> memory addresses backing this VMA. If the FS can't do that it must
> fail.
> 

Yes. Duration is probably less important than the fact that the page
is specially treated.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20190211102402.GF19029@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
thanks,
-- 
John Hubbard
NVIDIA