Re: [PATCH] mm/pgtable: Drop pgtable_t variable from pte_fn_t functions

From: Matthew Wilcox
Date: Fri May 03 2019 - 09:28:13 EST


On Thu, May 02, 2019 at 04:14:57PM +0200, Martin Schwidefsky wrote:
> On Thu, 2 May 2019 06:46:23 -0700
> Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, May 02, 2019 at 06:48:46PM +0530, Anshuman Khandual wrote:
> > > Drop the pgtable_t variable from all implementation for pte_fn_t as none of
> > > them use it. apply_to_pte_range() should stop computing it as well. Should
> > > help us save some cycles.
> >
> > You didn't add Martin Schwidefsky for some reason. He introduced
> > it originally for s390 for sub-page page tables back in 2008 (commit
> > 2f569afd9c). I think he should confirm that he no longer needs it.
>
> With its 2K pte tables s390 can not deal with a (struct page *) as a reference
> to a page table. But if there are no user of the apply_to_page_range() API
> left which actually make use of the token argument we can safely drop it.

Interestingly, I don't think there ever was a user which used that
argument. Looking at your 2f56 patch, you only converted one function
(presumably there was only one caller of apply_to_page_range() at the
time), and it didn't u se any of the arguments. Xen was the initial user,
and the two other functions they added also didn't use that argument.

Looking at a quick sample of users added since, none of them appear to
have ever used that argument. So removing it seems best.

Acked-by: Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>