Re: [PATCH v1 10/15] block: add gup flag to bio_add_page()/bio_add_pc_page()/__bio_add_page()

[Jerome Glisse]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 04:59:52PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> Hi Jerome!
> 
> On Thu 11-04-19 17:08:29, jglisse@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > From: Jérôme Glisse <jglisse@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > 
> > We want to keep track of how we got a reference on page added to bio_vec
> > ie wether the page was reference through GUP (get_user_page*) or not. So
> > add a flag to bio_add_page()/bio_add_pc_page()/__bio_add_page() to that
> > effect.
> 
> Thanks for writing this patch set! Looking through patches like this one,
> I'm a bit concerned. With so many bio_add_page() callers it's difficult to
> get things right and not regress in the future. I'm wondering whether the
> things won't be less error-prone if we required that all page reference
> from bio are gup-like (not necessarily taken by GUP, if creator of the bio
> gets to struct page he needs via some other means (e.g. page cache lookup),
> he could just use get_gup_pin() helper we'd provide).  After all, a page
> reference in bio means that the page is pinned for the duration of IO and
> can be DMAed to/from so it even makes some sense to track the reference
> like that. Then bio_put() would just unconditionally do put_user_page() and
> we won't have to propagate the information in the bio.
> 
> Do you think this would be workable and easier?

Thinking again on this, i can drop that patch and just add a new
bio_add_page_from_gup() and then it would be much more obvious that
only very few places need to use that new version and they are mostly
obvious places. It is usualy GUP then right away add the pages to bio
or bvec.

We can probably add documentation around GUP explaining that if you
want to build a bio or bvec from GUP you must pay attention to which
function you use.

Also pages going in a bio are not necessarily written too, they can
be use as source (writting to block) or as destination (reading from
block). So having all of them with refcount bias as GUP would muddy
the water somemore between pages we can no longer clean (ie GUPed)
and those that are just being use in regular read or write operation.

Cheers,
Jérôme