tree b0cc7cabeb0b23d97d5bd5080836d57bc5ee4689
parent db114b83ab6064d9b1d6ec5650e096c89bd95e25
author Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk> 1260842367 -0800
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1260895999 -0800

ksm: take keyhole reference to page

There's a lamentable flaw in KSM swapping: the stable_node holds a
reference to the ksm page, so the page to be freed cannot actually be
freed until ksmd works its way around to removing the last rmap_item from
its stable_node.  Which in some configurations may take minutes: not quite
responsive enough for memory reclaim.  And we don't want to twist KSM and
its locking more tightly into the rest of mm.  What a pity.

But although the stable_node needs to hold a pointer to the ksm page, does
it actually need to raise the reference count of that page?

No.  It would need to do so if struct pages were ordinary kmalloc'ed
objects; but they are more stable than that, and reused in particular ways
according to particular rules.

Access to stable_node from its pointer in struct page is no problem, so
long as we never free a stable_node before the ksm page itself has been
freed.  Access to struct page from its pointer in stable_node: reintroduce
get_ksm_page(), and let that peep out through its keyhole (the stable_node
pointer to ksm page), to see if that struct page still holds the right key
to open it (the ksm page mapping pointer back to this stable_node).

This relies upon the established way in which free_hot_cold_page() sets an
anon (including ksm) page->mapping to NULL; and relies upon no other user
of a struct page to put something which looks like the original
stable_node pointer (with two low bits also set) into page->mapping.  It
also needs get_page_unless_zero() technique pioneered by speculative
pagecache; and uses rcu_read_lock() to keep the guarantees that gives.

There are several drivers which put pointers of their own into page->
mapping; but none of those could coincide with our stable_node pointers,
since KSM won't free a stable_node until it sees that the page has gone.

The only problem case found is the pagetable spinlock USE_SPLIT_PTLOCKS
places in struct page (my own abuse): to accommodate GENERIC_LOCKBREAK's
break_lock on 32-bit, that spans both page->private and page->mapping.
Since break_lock is only 0 or 1, again no confusion for get_ksm_page().

But what of DEBUG_SPINLOCK on 64-bit bigendian?  When owner_cpu is 3
(matching PageKsm low bits), it might see 0xdead4ead00000003 in page->
mapping, which might coincide?  We could get around that by...  but a
better answer is to suppress USE_SPLIT_PTLOCKS when DEBUG_SPINLOCK or
DEBUG_LOCK_ALLOC, to stop bloating sizeof(struct page) in their case -
already proposed in an earlier mm/Kconfig patch.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>
Cc: Izik Eidus <ieidus@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>